


On the Riverbank

by Elldritch



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Feels, F/F, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Implied/Referenced Suicide, Puns are funny automatically, Resurrection beasts - more like resurrection breasts amirite?, Two girls; one body
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:23:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 29,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25992853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elldritch/pseuds/Elldritch
Summary: Gideon and Harrow get a chance to make decisions for the future, but they have very different opinions, particularly when it comes to who gets custody of Harrow's body.Harrow the Ninth spoilers - diverges from chapter 52/53 but spoilers for the whole book
Relationships: Gideon Nav & Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 64
Kudos: 114





	1. Harrow

**Author's Note:**

> Look, I know I can't be the only one who spent the whole book just praying for a chance for Gideon and Harrow to interact! At the end of the book, Harrow and Gideon both end up in the river. So I thought, what if they came together there, instead of ending up wherever they each end up? (seriously though, where the hell are they both?!)
> 
> Harrow picks up from chapter 53, from when she pops the bubble
> 
> Gideon's narrative picks up from midway through chapter 52, basically following on from "Then the pressure closed its hands around your wrists, and your chest pounded inward"

The moment the bubble was no more than shreds of white at the edges of her vision, the River dragged Harrow in and under, and it was immediately obvious that the current which held her had a specific destination in mind. Abigail had been right; Harrow's body called to her spirit, no matter how ambivalent she was about returning to it.

In the end, it was fortunate she hadn't been strong enough to fight the pull, because when her body came into view, she saw with dawning horror that it had been plunged to the very bottom of the River, and whoever was in there – _did she dare to hope it could be Gideon? -_ clearly didn't have the necromantic power to traverse the River safely.

In fact, Harrow had no idea how they'd even gotten into the River at all, let alone to the very depths of the Barathron. Then she noticed the Saint of Duty nearby – his body, not just the spirit which she'd last seen fighting the resurrection beast – and decided that it was not unreasonable to attribute her body's mortal peril to the lyctor who had tried to kill her so many times.

Though the Saint of Duty appeared to be in similar distress Harrow put him out of her mind and returned her attention to her own, smaller body. She saw its limbs feebly clawing through the water, trying to ascend, even as she could hear the pop of each rib being crushed by the pressure.

The eyes opened, caught Harrow's, and they were _Gideon's_ eyes.

Harrow didn't stop to think. She grabbed the outstretched wrist and pulled, dragging Gideon up to shallower waters. Her body's skin was almost viscous under her hands, and she had to fight to grip it without sinking back inside. Given that she wasn't sure how she'd managed to leave it under Gideon's apparent control in the first place, she knew that she couldn't risk re-entry.

A lack of mis-buttoned shirts in her closet each morning, or other assorted idiotic pranks, since she had become a lyctor indicated that Gideon hadn't simply surfaced each time she lost consciousness, and Harrow had experienced enough attempted assassinations to know that nearly dying wouldn't do the trick either. Harrow suspected that if she returned to her body now, she most likely would not be able to get back out again before doing irreparable harm to Gideon's soul, so she focused all of her considerable will on ferrying her body to safety, while simultaneously resisting the siren call of flesh to spirit.

By the time Harrow had dragged her body all the way to the Riverbank, it had become completely limp and almost impossible to move. Dead altogether, or the dead weight of unconsciousness? She couldn't tell. Harrow held her breath – _did spirits need to breathe?_ she wondered, and then discarded the thought as inconsequential. Breath or not, she held something tight within her chest as the body lay unmoving.

_Had it all been for nothing?_

After what seemed an eternity, Harrow detected the slightest movement in the chest. Not the rhythmic expansion and deflation of breath, but a swell of reforming sternum. The torso reconstructed itself, one crunch of crushed vertebra and pop of relocated rib at a time.

Then, finally, the twisted limbs straightened, and the body looked less like a corpse tossed carelessly from the very top of Drearburh, and more like someone who was simply sleeping. If sleeping it was, then the sleep was a kindness – lyctoral healing was rapid, but Harrow knew that it was far from painless.

The eyes opened, and they were still the gold Harrow had seen in the River. They were still Gideon's. Harrow knew that she should leave – lose herself in the River before the temptation of returning to her own flesh overtook her, but she was captivated by those eyes, and so she hesitated. Surely just a moment would be safe?

As those eyes caught Harrow's, the face twisted into an unmistakeable scowl. Harrow would have recognised Gideon's expressions on far stranger a canvas than this one. It truly was Gideon, then, and Harrow felt a surge of relief that, with Gideon's safety assured, all her tribulations had been vindicated.

Gideon's anger was so frank and uncomplicated, painted across Harrow's features, so different to Harrow's own fury, seen so many times in the mirror, that Harrow was forced to confront the sudden understanding that, unlike Gideon's, her own anger had always been partially directed inwards; her ire ever leavened by self-loathing.

This knowledge only reinforced her determination to end her existence, so that Gideon's could continue. If there was only one life to be lived between the two of them, then Gideon would make far better use of it than Harrow ever could. Death had always seemed a failure, to Harrow. An abdication of her responsibility to the generation of Ninth children who had died to bring her into being, but this was a death without any sense of failure – what more could she do to honour her House's lost sons and daughters, than give her life for the only one who remained?

Harrow understood immediately why Gideon was so angry to see her; she must think Harrow had come to steal her body back. Perhaps it was forgivable for Harrow to stay, then, just long enough to tell Gideon that she was relinquishing her flesh permanently, and with nothing but gratitude and affection for its new occupant. Gideon should not be forced to live her life with the worry that Harrow could return at any moment to take everything away from her. Harrow had taken so much from her already.

Harrow had subjected herself to untold humiliation and debasement in her efforts to preserve Gideon's soul. She had lived months in a fog of paranoid dislocation, but would count the cost as trivial, if she could only see the look on Gideon's face when she realised that she was finally free. Thanks was probably too much to expect, after everything Harrow had put her through, yet Harrow couldn't help entertaining a small fantasy of gratitude.

Even if Gideon couldn't forgive her past sins, Harrow knew she could return to the River and lose herself with no regrets, as long as she could hold to the knowledge that Gideon was happy at last, and able to live her life without complication.

Harrow opened her mouth to tell Gideon that she had no intention of ousting her, but Gideon beat her to it, drawing a swift, deep breath and speaking before Harrow could utter a single syllable.

“Get your ass back in here, Nonagesimus!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, I'm a tad handwavey about the mechanics of the river, because (like everything else in these glorious and mind-boggling books) I actually don't have a clue what is going on. Please forgive the liberties taken!


	2. Harrow

“Get back in here right now or I'll... I'll chop off another thumb!”

Harrow wasn't sure what she had thought would happen, if she was somehow given one last opportunity to speak to Gideon Nav, her cavalier, the other half of her soul, but she was certain it wasn't this. 

It wasn't like she'd spent hours, tear-streaked in the darkness of her bed, planning exactly what she'd say in this unlikely eventuality, because – well – she hadn't remembered that Gideon even existed until very recently, and things had been somewhat hectic since then. But even with months to plan, Harrow wasn't sure she'd have found the right words.

What words were there to confess a love weighted down, tarnished, but never – _never_ – weakened or diluted, by almost two decades of shared trauma? How could she ever begin to explain a lifetime of cruelty as the pain of holding on too tight?

Harrow had systematically crushed Gideon's dreams, because Gideon dreamed only of leaving the Ninth – leaving her - and when Gideon had died, she had confirmed what Harrow long suspected – that Harrowhark Nonagesimus was nothing without Gideon Nav. She was a void, an absence. What was an unstoppable force, without an immovable object to break itself against?

What were two hundred dead souls without the one that lived?

In the end, Harrow was too startled by the sound of Gideon's diction emerging from her vastly different vocal cords to respond with anything more than the habitual, reflexive acerbity that had characterised the majority of their interactions.

“Another thumb? From what I can see all our thumbs are perfectly intact. Really, Griddle, do try to pay attention – our thumbs are right there in front of you!” It wasn't the confession of love that it should have been. But then, perhaps it was close enough. 

Neither Harrow nor Gideon had been shown enough love as children to know how to express it. If the heat of anger was the only thing she knew to speak, then it was still heat. Still fire and still passion. Gideon Nav's hatred had always meant more to Harrow than the worshipful reverence of her entire, if somewhat depleted, congregation.

“Yeah, _now_ they are.” Gideon snapped, the retort lacking her usual composure. Gideon sounded... agitated. Harried, in a way Harrow had rarely heard before, even when under extreme pressure. Gideon had kept her humour and brashness even when facing down Cytherea; but she'd lost it now.

Harrow was still adjusting to the surreal juxtaposition of Gideon's vocabulary, Gideon's tone, in Harrow's own voice. Harrow's feeble necromantic lungs couldn't lend Gideon's words the weight Harrow was accustomed to hearing in them, but Harrow was certain that she was correct in her assessment of her cavalier's tone – Gideon was stressed! 

But Gideon was still speaking, and Harrow forced herself to focus on the words themselves rather than dwelling on her tone.

“Half an hour ago, this one here,” Gideon waggled the offending digit, “got eaten by a space bee. Have I mentioned how delighted I was that you left me to rot in a corner of your brain, only to let me out when you'd been stabbed all to hell, so I could save your ass... again?”

“ _I_ was trying to save _you_ , you ungrateful...” Harrow responded on autopilot, mind racing. It couldn't be possible – lyctors healed well, but, as Ianthe had so ably demonstrated, lost limbs – or thumbs – did not regenerate. If a herald genuinely had removed one of their thumbs, then it should have healed as a stump, and yet there both thumbs were – whole and entire.

“Save me?” Gideon interrupted her ruminations, “I never asked you to save me, you skull-faced simpleton. I'm your cavalier. I save you, not the other way around. You were supposed to eat me, and then you'd be a big shot lyctor and actually able to save yourself for once you useless fucking princess. Oh, and by the way, if you'd just done your job and munched up my soul like I asked you to, then I never would have had to meet my dad, which was, in fact, an experience I could have done without.”

“Your... father?” Harrow's mind, previously racing, came to an abrupt halt at this apparent non-sequitur.

“Yeah, you might know him. Brown hair, drinks a lot of tea, goes by the name of 'god'?”

If Gideon noticed the expression of abject confusion which Harrow knew must be on her face, it didn't stop her, or even slow her down. In fact, if anything, Gideon's words sped up, spewing in an angry torrent from Harrow's lips.

“He's a total dickhead! If being a lyctor means spending the next myriad with him, I'm not surprised you got yourself stabbed and left your body to die – even if it is just the most ungrateful thing I've ever heard of, after I died for you, but why the hell did you have to leave me to sort everything out?”

“I didn't... I wasn't...” Harrow stuttered, completely incapable of making sense of the stream of utter nonsense that Gideon was now almost shouting at her – though Harrow had to admit, a shout from her lungs was hardly an impressive thing to someone used to the commotion Gideon could cause in her original body.

“Oh, and I met my mum too, and I'm not sure which of my parents is the bigger asshole! Glad I didn't get saddled with her name though. Mouthful-and-a-half that was; I can't even remember most of it. I'm sticking with Gideon Nav, thank you very much. Except I shouldn't have to be sticking with anything – I should be dead! I am dead! And one of the perks of being dead is not having to worry about keeping _anyone's_ insides on the inside anymore, so get back in here and take care of your own intestines, you feckless necro.”


	3. Harrow

Harrow had to take a moment. If Gideon was right, and not suffering from some form of tragic space dementia, then... no. It was just too ridiculous to consider. The very suggestion of it would mean upending an entire lifetime's perspective on the natural order of things. She was the Reverend Daughter of Drearburh. Now a lyctor, a saint. God's last and least regarded lyctor maybe – barely better than a vestigial sixth finger compared to his other Hands and Gestures, but a lyctor nonetheless. Gideon was... was Gideon. The most insignificant member of God's tiniest House.

Not that Gideon wasn't important to _Harrow_ ... she was Harrow's whole world, but central to that was, well, that she was _Harrow's_. Harrow's to hate and to love, Harrow's to preserve or destroy. Harrow was the sun, and Gideon the satellite. Like the body in the Locked Tomb, Harrow found that she could only bear to love what was hers alone.

Gideon's dalliance with 'Dulcinea' had been bad enough; it had shaken Harrow in a way she had been entirely unprepared for, having never considered the possibility that Gideon was capable of building her life upon more pillars than her fraught relationship with Harrow, her filthy magazines, and that thrice-damned sword. How Harrow hated that sword, even more than she hated Gideon's prurient reading materials. 

Harrow could almost be glad that Cytherea had turned out to be not only an imposter, but homicidal to boot, deftly quashing any budding romance Gideon might have entertained. The idea that Gideon could be the daughter of God, with all that this would entail... the thought was unbearable.

As she had so often before, Harrow smothered her fears beneath a blanket of scorn.

“You're telling me that God had a baby? I think we'd know if God had a baby, don't you, Nav?” Harrow said, in the tone one would use when speaking to a rather simple child. “I somehow doubt that God would abandon his baby and its mother in Ninth House atmosphere in a space suit with dead batteries.

“Was it the bees?”, she continued, in mock concern. “Did you look at too many space bees and go a bit funny? Your mental faculties never were up to much, Griddle”

“My mental faculties? You have the nerve to talk about my mental faculties when you stuck half your brain inside a bone and trusted Ianthe – _Ianthe_ – to help you do it? He didn't know about me, obviously. Those old creeps, Patience and his sour-faced Joyfriend? They seduced him – ew, by the way; I saw the reboot from inside your head and it was basically the worst, even before I knew god was my dad – and then they gave his special sauce to my mum along with, like, a turkey baster.

“Nine months later out I popped, one billion times hotter and less gross than I had any right to be, with those weirdo parents. Apparently they needed god-DNA to break the blood wards on the locked tomb – they were going to blow me up and get your frozen girlfriend to kill the emperor. What was it about my cute tiny baby face which had everyone sticking 'commit infanticide' on the to-do list? And why the hell are you the one person in the whole wide universe who won't get on board the Gideon Nav murder train?”

Harrow froze inside, recalling with a sinking inevitability that day when she'd been ten, and Gideon eleven. She'd been too young to really understand her fixation with Gideon. Her feelings were too huge, too complex, and honestly too unwelcome, to examine. This had been the day she realised that clawing through Gideon's skin was a poor substitute for what she really wanted. She didn't want to rend Gideon's flesh, not really, she wanted to climb inside it; fold their bones together until they formed one indivisible whole.

Harrow's entire life had been defined by a sense of inadequacy. When weighed against the two hundred lives which had been sacrificed for hers, she could only ever find herself wanting, no matter her achievements. 

And then there was Gideon, Gideon who survived. Gideon and her bloody-minded self-possession. Gideon who was so perversely confident in her own supreme excellence, despite what everyone else in the Ninth considered to be an abundance of evidence to the contrary. Harrow had craved that surety, and for as long as she could remember, she'd been absorbed with the conviction that Gideon was its only possible source.

Now, Harrow remembered the sensation of blood, still wet under her fingernails, and the realisation that she could never have what Gideon had. She could flay Gideon alive, strip the meat from her bones, pull every last organ still dripping from her over-muscled torso, and never find the origin of her confidence or her clarity. Only Gideon would ever be Gideon, and Harrow was destined to never be more than Harrow.

She remembered deciding to end it, remembered rolling the rock away from the tomb and being startled by the sudden permeability of the wards behind it. Not that it had been _easy_ , but that it was possible at all... Fool that she was, she thought that the tomb had opened for _her_. That she'd attained some level of exquisite necromantic expertise, or sacrificial purity of spirit. That she was _special_ to the beloved ice maiden that dwelt within, when it turns out that this – arguably the most important moment of her short life– had been Gideon's all along.

Was that why she'd been so blinkered during the lyctor trials? So stubbornly certain that this, at least, was something Harrow could achieve alone, when Gideon insisted that the cavalier was central to the process? And of course, the last laugh had been Gideon's. It always was.

She remembered God's utter certainty that she couldn't have broken his wards, and this, she supposed, served as confirmation of Gideon's outlandish claims. Certainly it could explain Gideon's - previously inexplicable - immunity to nerve gas, and the alleged regenerating thumb.

“You tell me this and in the same breath you ask me to destroy you?” Harrow said in a voice that was entirely numb. “You truly must have lost your senses, Gideon.”

She hadn't meant to use Gideon's name. She may be able to think the name, now, without giving herself a haemorrhage but it still felt unfamiliar in her mouth; it tasted less like a name, and more like a confession. She almost couldn't continue, couldn't force the rest of her words past that name, but she made herself carry on.

“If I couldn't bring myself to end your existence when you were a rootless orphan, then what makes you think that I'm going to merrily slaughter you now you're the child of God?”

“He doesn't want me, Harrow. I'd make a terrible daughter. I won't hang on his every word like you do, and it's got to be a real kick in the balls that I'm both funnier _and_ hotter than him. Besides! Having a daughter around would make it totally awkward the next time he has ménage-à-trois for dinner. I'm not even a necromancer – imagine the disappointment! I don't want him, he doesn't want me, and being as Augustine and Mercymorn both just died trying to murder him, and he got saved by _Ianthe_ of all people, he needs every lyctor he can get. Though, worth mentioning, I'm pretty sure he's the bad guy, so, y'know, bear that one in mind for the future. But either way, he doesn't want me. Nobody wants me! Apparently even you don't want me, but that's just tough titties, because you've got me. You can't have your cavalier and eat her, so chow down, sunshine.”

Harrow couldn't find the words to say that she did want Gideon, she wanted Gideon more than anything, more than life itself. That she'd rather die a thousand times than live a minute more in a universe without her, but Gideon apparently read her silence as refusal, because she kept speaking.

“Look, I know you had a sheltered upbringing, so let me clear some things up for you. When you eat someone, the next step is to _swallow_. Well, or spit, but there's no spitting me back out. In case you hadn't noticed, I don't have a body to go back to. I'm dead. So just get on with it already. I can't stand this place; it smells like haemorrhoids.”

“You can't be dead,” Harrow whispered. “I won't let you. You are not the brightest star in my sky, Gideon Nav, you are the only star; you are my sun. My entire self is built around you – without you I crumble. I have no coherence, no substance of my own. The only other things in my life were the God who fathered you, and the tomb which opened for your blood. What is there for me without you?

“I know that I have been unkind... that is the least of the words you could use to describe my behaviour towards you. I have been unconscionably and intentionally cruel, but believe me when I say that my crimes against you dwindle into insignificance, when compared to what you did to me when you died. My life was not yours to save! I refuse to burn even one more soul on the pyre of my monstrous existence. The thought that I should continue, and that you should not, is a nonsense. Live, Nav. If you can't... if you _won't_ live for me, then live to spite me. Join the cohort, travel the universe, hell, find some dying seventh House necromancer and be her cavalier, do anything you want! Just live. Please.”


	4. Gideon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all can have a little Gideon POV, as a treat :)

Gideon didn't know quite what to say to that. It had been so obvious to her that Harrow had refused to consume her soul out of sheer petty aversion to grubbying up her eternal life with a debt owed to the person she hated most in the world. It had never even occurred to Gideon that Harrow might have been trying to save her. True, Gideon still existed, which was more the other lyctors could say of _their_ cavs, but Ianthe had a point, however much Gideon begrudged her being right about anything. Why the hell had Harrow made herself forget Gideon, if she really did... care? Gideon couldn't bring herself to even think the word 'love', in relation to the Reverend Daughter, and steadfastly refused to examine why.

Still. The 'please' gave Gideon pause. She could count the number of times Harrow had ever said 'please' to her before this on her thumbs. She could have, even if the thumb the space bee ate hadn't grown back. Harrowhark Nonagesimus did not say please.

That left three options. One – Harrowhark was insane. Given the amateur brain surgery she'd performed on herself, this certainly wasn't one to rule out, but most of Harrow's crazy involved vomiting about swords, bleeding out the ears, and getting people's names wrong. None of it had made her either sentimental or suicidal.

Option two – this was a trick. Gideon wasn't quite sure what Harrow stood to gain by giving up both a body and the prospect of ultimate power, but Harrow's schemes were often too labyrinthine for anyone who wasn't a creepy bone nun to understand, so again, hard to rule out entirely. At the same time, it was not a possibility which required much thought either way - even if it was a trick, then Gideon would simply continue the trend of a lifetime (and beyond, apparently), and do the opposite of whatever the Reverend Daughter wanted her to.

Three – Harrowhark was being honest. Here Gideon thought Harrow wanted a cavalier, and all along she'd just been angling for some hot Gideon Nav action. Not that Gideon wasn't painfully attractive, but that really didn't account for Harrow still giving a shit now that Gideon was a disembodied spirit stuck in the body of a depressed stick insect.

So, fine. Option one it must be. Harrowhark was crazy. That was good, actually. Made things simple. Gideon's job hadn't changed; she was Harrow's cavalier, and it was her duty to save Harrow, even from herself. All she had to do was convince Harrow to take her body back, and then she could get on with being dead properly. The peaceful kind of dead, where she didn't have to worry about thumbs or intestines, or parents.

In the same way that Gideon's brain was simply incapable of forming the word 'love' in relation to Harrow, her aptitude for self-deception also left her no room to consider that self-sacrifice is a whole lot less noble when it's technically indistinguishable from just running away from your feelings, and that – had anyone been rude enough to point it out – there were certain uncomfortable parallels that could be drawn between Harrow's behaviour and her own.

“Look, this River place, it's not real, is it? It's some messed up necromancer place where I'm really not supposed to be, and I don't want to be stuck here for eternity. Since your fellow lyctors are either dead or have fucked all the way off, why don't you just hop on in here to get us back to the real world. I'll be good, I promise! Cross my heart I won't do any dying while you walk your body back to somewhere that smells less of ass, and then we'll work things out. Okay?”

Look, she knew it was a lie. She fully intended to get on with the dying just as soon as she figured out how, but she had to get Harrow back in her body first. Gideon still figured that the goodness points she got for falling on a railing outweighed a teensy little lie, but letting Harrow die now would stick her straight into a deficit. She was pretty proud of the lie, actually. It sounded totally plausible.

“I _can't_ , Nav! Don't you see – now that my mind remembers you, I won't be able to stop myself from completing the lyctor process. That's why I had to shut off all comprehension of you in the first place. As soon as I started, the end became inevitable, like falling into a gravity well. I can stop my breath, freeze my heartbeat, turn my intestines inside out and wear them as a scarf...”

“You always did have the worst fashion sense,” Gideon interjected, but Harrow ignored her - frankly hilarious - contribution and continued.

“...but I cannot save you once I re-enter my body. The process happens at a level that's more than just instinctual. What I did with Ianthe to get us this far... it was my very best work; a truly magnificent work of necromancy, if I do say so myself. Honestly, I don't know that even Mercymorn could have done better, and yet it was barely enough! Even if that horrid revenant hadn't been trying to possess me, the cracks were already showing. I dragged spirits out of the River – some of them spirits of people I'd never even met – to act out make-believe nonsense, trying to resolve the conflicts between my recollections and my perceptions. It is untenable! We cannot coexist, and I will not exist without you, so I'm afraid this is the only way.”

Gideon could see Harrow readying herself to fall back into the water, so she reached out to grab her before she could. Harrow's reflexes could never have caught Gideon's body, but even without a body weighing her down, Harrow's spirit wasn't nimble, and so Gideon's mind had the advantage, even in substandard meat.

Typical Harrow, to declare something so high-handedly, and then bugger off before Gideon could get a word in edgeways. Whatever Harrow might say, she was still the same Reverend Daughter who would have minced her own liver to fertilise the snow-leek fields before she ever let Gideon have a say in anything.

With Harrow safely in hand, Gideon tried again.

“Look. If you really love me – and I'm not saying I believe you, but fine, whatever – if you really love me, you won't do this to me! I should have died at least three times since you went AWOL. Probably four now – and I am sorry about that, but look, I really did try my best, and you did not leave me the easiest set of circumstances to work with. Anyway, this body is apparently on board with going full lyctor, even if you aren't, so it is not dying any time soon, and I refuse to live a myriad showering with my clothes on! This is a necromancer's body; I could work out 24/7 for ten years and you probably wouldn't develop a single muscle. I'm not equipped to live life as a spooky twig.”

“Gideon...”

“No! None of this 'Gideon' nonsense. That isn't my name. Well, it is, but you know what I mean. You don't call me Gideon, you call me Griddle, and then you scowl like you're trying to beat the whole Ninth House in a game of who-has-the-most-wrinkles, and I punch you in the face. Remember? This isn't us. You don't love me; you love that frosty fuck in the locked tomb, so hop back on in here already – if you hurry, you can probably exhume my corpse while it's still good and juicy and get her out. I was literally born to wake her up, and you're in love with her – that's maths that even _I_ can do, Nonagesimus. One flesh, one end. Well, we're down to one flesh, so give me my damn end. I refuse to be less of a cavalier than Naberius fucking Tern.”

“I will never understand you, Griddle”

“Well I've got an easy solution to that. Kill me, and then you won't need to understand jack shit!”

Harrow stopped struggling within Gideon's grip, no longer trying to get away. She sighed, then fell silent for a moment, before replying.

“You never wanted to be my cavalier in the first place, I know that. Aiglamene and I had to blackmail you into it, and yet now you say you want to die to prove how much of a cavalier you are? You never cared about the locked tomb, yet now apparently you'd die to open it? You were never exactly faithful, but you'll die so God has another lyctor at his disposal? You used to be obsessed with the thought of having parents, and now you've found them, you want to die to get away from them? You've threatened to murder me on countless occasions, yet now you'd die to save me! You've got a dozen reasons why I should kill you, and not a one of them makes the slightest bit of sense.”

Gideon could feel heat rising to her cheeks, and found herself missing, for the first time, the skull paint which worked so well at hiding her feelings, even if it did give her the most appalling acne. She was startled, and flinched, when Harrow raised her free hand, but Harrow didn't strike her – she laid her hand awkwardly on top of Gideon's, as if trying to provide comfort. Gideon hated that Harrow thought she needed that. Hated even more the thought that she needed comfort _from Harrow_ .

“If you want this,” Harrow said, her voice as gentle as her touch, and just as awkward in its gentleness, “if you really want to die, then make me understand why. You could have thrown yourself off Drearburh, or let Cytherea skewer you. You beg to die, yet when I found you in the River, you were swimming for the surface. So I can only conclude that you _don't_ want to die – what you want is for me to kill you. If I am to live forever with your blood on my hands, then don't I at least deserve to know why?”


	5. Harrow

“Look,” Gideon said, eventually, “I always knew what my life would look like. I'd hate you, you'd hate me, I'd try to escape, you'd stop me. Lather, rinse, repeat, until everyone else had died, and it was only us left in the whole of the Ninth. Well, us and Ortus, but, you know what I mean. He doesn't really count.”

Harrow couldn't suppress a smile at this, although it was a smile tinged with sorrow. She'd always had such a narrow view of what was important in a person. She had called Magnus foolish, and yet he'd meant something to Gideon, back in Canaan House – the true Canaan House. Having had the opportunity to meet him again in the River, Harrow now suspected she had been the foolish one; there was strength behind his unwavering good humour, and courage to his kindness.

Abigail she had discounted for refusing to shackle her scholarship to cold ambition, but now Harrow wondered how different her life might have been, if she'd ever learned to love knowledge for itself, regardless of its utility; if she'd ever learned to love _anything_ without considering its objective worth. And Ortus... she had written off Ortus as useless because of his obsession with _The Noniad_ , when his devotion to honouring Matthias Nonius, the legendary hero of her House, had saved more souls than just hers.

“I always underestimated him” Harrow said. “We all did, and I think perhaps we shouldn't have. But anyway, that hardly matters now. And you would have gotten away from me in the end, Griddle. I may be powerful, but I'm not omniscient – you know I caught your last attempt more through luck than judgment.”

“More fool me then, for doing such a good job. Think, Harrow. What would I have done in the cohort? I know it isn't like the comics, not really, and it certainly isn't a bit like Frontline Titties of the Fifth. It's all team work, and following orders, and uniforms that cover your entire chest. Sure, it was fun to fantasise, but if there's one thing I realised in Canaan House, it's that I might be a million times less Ninth than you, but that still makes me too Ninth to fit in anywhere else.”

Harrow was startled to hear Gideon describe herself this way, when she'd always previously defined herself in opposition to everything Ninth. She'd done her cavalier more of a disservice than she'd realised, enforcing robes and paint and silence, for reasons which seemed so petty now. All of Harrow's secrets had come out in the end, anyway – God knew of how she'd been born, and how her parents died, and he hadn't so much as batted an eyelid at either, and so everything she'd done to protect those secrets now seemed pointless. If she hadn't worked so hard to isolate Gideon from the other heirs and their cavaliers, would Gideon have taken the chance to escape with Camilla, when Harrow had offered it?

Would she even now be sharing that cramped shuttle with the other Canaan House survivors? Harrow could picture her sparring with Camilla. Irritating the rigid second House necromancer, Judith. Kissing Coronabeth... The vision brought a jealous twist to the guts Harrow technically didn't currently possess, and she was all too happy to push the thought away and listen when Gideon carried on talking.

“Even when I was dreaming about what it would be like to be in the cohort, I was always just picturing that letter landing on your desk telling you how brave and amazing and totally indispensable I was and how I'd basically saved the whole empire single-handedly, and then you'd sigh, and say 'gosh, if only I'd been nicer, maybe Griddle would have stayed with me forever', because staying with you forever was always the plan! I just wanted to make you work for it. I wanted to know you wanted that too.”

_I did want that. If you only knew how much I wanted it..._

“If I'd gotten on that shuttle, and Crux had planted a bomb in it, that would have been the kindest thing that old bastard ever did for me, because I don't make sense away from you. When you're around, it's all 'ooh, Gideon is so tall, and strong, and incredibly hot'. Without you there for comparison, what if I ended up just being, you know, averagely tall, and averagely strong?”

“And averagely hot?” Harrow shot back, fixing her mind ruthlessly on the present. It was much too late for what-ifs and might-have-beens.

“As if! When it comes to hotness, I go to 11, and you know it, sweetcheeks. But look, we're being sidetracked by my immense attractiveness, which is totally understandable, but if you can tear yourself away from remembering my washboard abs for a minute, I'm trying to have, like, a moment here”

“Griddle!” Harrow scoffed. “I was thinking nothing of the sort. Get your mind out of the gutter!” With awful hypocrisy, the image of Gideon and Coronabeth resurfaced – this time with rather less clothing; Gideon's midriff was entirely on display, and Harrow's subconscious apparently agreed with Gideon's assessment of her physique, for washboard abs they were. With this image came a heat which flushed in her cheeks, rather than turning in her stomach. Harrow shook her head, dismissing both the thought, and the feelings it brought with it – feelings which were oddly physical, given her current lack of a physical form.

“Don't you see how pointless I am like this?” Gideon gestured to Harrow's body, having apparently failed to notice Harrow's momentary discomfiture. “If I don't make sense without you, I make even less sense without you, _and_ without me! Me and my two-hander, we're the dream team. Do you have any idea what it was like trying to fight in your body? Even if I started lifting those weights that you were supposed to be lifting this whole time, your reach isn't long enough, your centre of gravity is all wrong, and you don't have enough bulk to counterbalance the weight of the blade. You may as well be a skeleton, for all the meat on these bones. I couldn't join the cohort, even if I wanted to, because you're too damn short! The only people in the cohort with this build are the necros, and I am decidedly not a necromancer.”

Harrow had to give her that much. Gideon as a necromancer was as ridiculous as the idea of Harrow as a cavalier, and there was a reason that those particular scenarios had destabilised the bubble so rapidly.

“So what am I supposed to do, if I can't fight? Go back to the Ninth? Oh yeah, that's going to go well. Not only is their beloved Reverend Daughter totally dead, but they can't even scoop out her bones to farm snow leeks because Gideon Nav's in her meat? You've got some sadistically devoted assholes down in that pit of despair, and I really don't want to find out exactly how many times Crux can stab this body before it finally works out how to die”

“But you're the daughter of God .” Harrow felt obliged to point out. “Don't you realise the opportunities this opens up for you?”

“Opportunities for what? Don't get me wrong, I'm as happy as the next person to sit around getting adored, but I'd rather be adored for something I actually did, not just because of who my dad is. And I need something to do! Something better than braiding Ianthe's hair while we both talk about how we'd rather be with Coronabeth. Now there's a body I wouldn't mind _getting into_ , if you know what I mean...”

“Now who's getting sidetracked?” Harrow said curtly, shutting down that line of conversation before it could go any further. She almost managed to force away the image which Gideon’s words inevitably prompted before she could notice that this time Gideon and Coronabeth had ditched both the last of their clothing and the shuttle in favour of a four-poster bed and toys which most definitely were not for children.

“It was supposed to be you and me forever!” Gideon continued, “Sure, we would both have hated every minute of it, but you need at least one person who doesn't give a shit that you're the Reverend Daughter, and only cares that you're a massive bitch. Keeps you humble.”

“If your aim was to somehow humble me, then I'm sad to say that your life was an abject failure. I learned the meaning of humility the moment you died, and not a second sooner.”

Harrow could almost miss her mind's uncomfortable turn towards the pornographic. There were other images which lurked in the quagmire of her thoughts – visions infinitely more devastating, for being remembered, not imagined; a black-robed body, stretched out beneath a blue and foreign sky; a small, tight smile on lips bloodless with death.

“These days I find pride to be just as alien a concept as humility once was. I have learned, all too well, the bitter taste of failure since you left me.” Harrow's voice was small, and harsh with tears both shed and unshed.

“But that's just the point! Think how bored you would have been without someone to push you, and challenge you. You raised glorious hell against Cytherea, and we both know you cut your hell-raising teeth beating me up. You can only polish one diamond with another, get me? What do you think Gideon Prime has been doing all this time? Even god could tell that you need someone to butt heads against to truly shine – he just didn't have the right Gideon to get the job done.”

“If I am forced to accept your premise, that your life lacks purpose without me, then I must insist you acknowledge that the same applies to me.” Harrow said, in a voice so tightly clipped, so utterly devoid of affect that each word cut like a scalpel. “It appears that we are an indivisible unit, and for either of us to be asked to continue alone is a cosmic joke, and a cruel one at that.”

“I guess we can agree on one thing, then,” Gideon replied, her own words falling haltingly, without their characteristic cadence.

They both fell silent for a moment.

“So what do we do?” Gideon asked, sounding like the child she'd never really had the chance to be.

“I don't know.”

It was such a strange thing for Harrow to hear herself say. It would have been rank arrogance to claim to have all the answers, but in the past, she'd always have followed 'I don't know' with 'yet'. 

Not now. There would be no theorem to solve this problem. No forbidden tome contained the secret mathematical principles of turning one into two. 

It was a bitter pill to swallow, the discovery that loving someone only meant grand gestures and glorious sacrifice in fairy tales. In the real world, loving someone meant giving them the choice to say yes, and the choice to say no, and honouring their answer.

Gideon had made her decision in the heat of the moment, and with no good choices open to her. She'd chosen to die, to give Harrow and Camilla a chance at life. In her own way, Harrow had done the same thing – with Gideon's soul being eroded second by second, Harrow had made the choice to save her, in the only way she could think to with the clock ticking down.

They'd both made choices for the other, and maybe that was forgivable, even noble, the first time around, but knowing what they both now knew, there was no excuse to repeat the error.

“I don't know,” Harrow said again, “but whatever we do, we had better do it quickly. With the resurrection beast gone, the ghosts are returning to this section of the River, and whatever you might think of my body, while you're in it, there are literally countless spirits willing to do what I could not and – as you so crudely put it – eat you.”

A moment passed as they both surveyed the ominously still ‘waters’ of the River around them.

There's nothing I can do, to make this life tolerable for you?” Harrow asked, finally.

“Nope.”

“Yes, well I feel the same.” Harrow replied, brusquely, and then continued in tones of bitter, exhausted defeat. “I've taken enough from you, Gideon, and I see now that it would be wrong to take this choice from you too.”

“So, what happens now?”

“We end it, I suppose. I may not be a spirit magician, but I've learned a thing or two about exorcism recently. If you really don't want to stay in my body, I think I can probably get you out. And then we go into the River, together.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't hate me! This isn't really the end, I promise!


	6. Gideon

Harrow paused a moment, and Gideon welcomed the opportunity to stop and think. A lifetime of habit made her immediately suspicious any time Harrowhark claimed to agree with her.

“Though, perhaps that would be irresponsible without making some preparations for the body. An empty body is an invitation to every passing spirit, and however ready I am to bid farewell to this universe for good, a vengeful revenant in possession of a lyctor's power is something of an inconsiderate parting gift.”

So, here it was, Harrow's scheme. What a disingenuous little shit she always was. _'Oh, of course, Griddle – I would let you have your way, but see, there's the teensy problem of leaving my body unoccupied. Guess you're going to have to stick around. So sorry!'_

Gideon thought for a moment, and inspiration struck. “What about Palamedes? It's got to be pretty rubbish being stuck in a skeleton hand – after that, even _your_ body might seem like an upgrade.”

_Let's see her get out of that one..._

Gideon expected Harrow to scoff at her suggestion, the way she always did at Gideon's ideas, or at least to protest the 'even', but Harrow didn't say anything. She wasn't even looking at Gideon anymore – Harrow was staring over Gideon's shoulder with a far-off, unfocused expression that Gideon had never seen from the outside, but had spent enough time in the back of Harrow's brain to recognise. A quick glance over her shoulder confirmed that there was nothing really there that could have caught Harrow’s eye.

“God's hairy balls, Harrow! You can't give me your undivided attention for five damn minutes without your girlfriend showing up? What, is she the jealous type?”

The epithet caught Harrow's attention as Gideon's genius suggestion had not. “For goodness' sake, Griddle, you always did possess the most repulsive turn of phrase. Given that God is, in fact, your father, don't you think that swearing by his... his genitals... is a tad inappropriate?”

“Exactly the opposite, actually. I came out of those testicles – well, half of me did anyway – so if anyone has the right to invoke them, surely it's me. Now, could you ignore the tomb tart for a moment and focus?”

“Wait, you can see her?”

“Not in the slightest, but I spent months in your brain, so I know the signs. Can't you, like, ask her to give us a moment?”

“Shush, Griddle, I'm trying to listen to what she's saying”

“Yes,” muttered Gideon to herself, “I can see how actually listening to someone isn't exactly something you've had much practice at, and you need to concentrate. Of course, just ignore me, and the billions of hungry ghosts headed our way and take as long as you need.”

“She's asking me to come to her,” Harrow said, in the airy, aimless tone of a mystic experiencing an ecstatic vision.

“Well, by all means, be my fucking guest,” Gideon said, and she was almost tempted to tell Harrow she'd changed her mind about giving up Harrow's body – just to spoil her necromancer's day, but before she could say another word, she was caught in a vision of her own.

There was a vast light, occluded by a vaguely human silhouette. Gideon's eyes adjusted, and the figure had those same eyes, her eyes, a stark, staring yellow set deep in a face too beautiful to be real, and simultaneously too terrible to have come from Gideon's imagination. It was a face Gideon recognised, but had only ever seen at some remove, filtered through Harrow's perceptions during those brief and infrequent surfacings.

Gideon had wanted the Body to leave, and - as had so often been the case in Gideon's life - what she'd gotten was the exact opposite of what she’d asked for.

The Body opened her mouth to speak, and Gideon found that she was honestly interested to hear what the spectre had to say for herself. She'd given Ianthe three minutes – she guessed she could give this other woman who had also messed with Harrow's fragile psyche the same courtesy, before she turned her attention to the problem of how exactly to punch a hallucination.

“Chest compressions. I know her sternum's shattered; ignore it. We need that heart pumping. On my mark.”

The voice she spoke in was not the one Gideon expected, and her words made no sense, but Gideon had little time to ponder these mysteries, as she felt hands on her chest – a chest broader and more generously muscled than the one she’d most recently occupied - her own chest. She felt hands, and pain, pain like an iron railing being driven through her, and the last thing she heard was Harrow calling her name, before everything went away.


	7. Harrow

“Gideon?” Harrow called, in sudden panic, as a jolt of disorientation twisted her vision, and she was staring down into the River. She couldn't see the Body, and nor could she see her own body anymore. She realised, with a start, that she was back inside her own flesh. Her skin prickled with icy dread as she turned her necromantic senses inwards – Gideon was not there. There was no trace of her cavalier's spirit inside herself. _Gone, or consumed?_

The waters of the River were not true water. Even if they had been, they were too turbulent, too discoloured by blood and effluvia for Harrow to check her eyes in her reflection. Instead, with ruthless efficiency, she grabbed one of her fingers and yanked it backwards. Joints popped, bones snapped, and tendons tore – in her haste, Harrow had done more damage than she intended, but to her horror, the tissues promptly knit themselves back together. It took a scant few heartbeats, even at the speed Harrow's heart was racing, before the finger was unbent, unbroken, and indistinguishable from its sisters.

“No no no no...” Harrow's chest was heaving. She knew she didn't need to breathe, but still she felt she was suffocating, despite pulling in desperate lungfuls of whatever passed for air in this spirit realm. It had all happened so fast; she didn't even know _how_ it had happened, but her healed finger proved that she had fully ascended to the ranks of lyctor, which she could only have done by destroying Gideon entirely.

Gideon was gone. The Body was gone. Harrow was alone, and the waters of the River were starting to seethe with returning spirits. She had no time to be paralysed by her grief, but it was inexorable and inescapable, as though a black hole had opened up within her. Gideon was gone.

She almost plunged herself straight into the River, to await her violent unmaking at the hands of countless hungry ghosts, but she remembered that the Body had appeared to her, had called her devoted acolyte to come home to the Ninth House. Perhaps to join her where she slumbered in her icy tomb? It was an honour she knew she did not deserve, to lay herself down for her eternal rest at the feet of her beloved, but she found herself too weak to deny herself this final comfort.

Newly galvanised by her decision, Harrow plunged back into the River. Harrow had only travelled physically through the River once, on her journey to the Mithraeum, and on that occasion, she had been in a shuttle, with an exquisite blood ward, and the guidance of the King Undying to preserve her. Perhaps she should have doubted her readiness for such a task, but Augustine had taken pains to teach both her and Ianthe how to navigate it, plunging them both into its depths time and again until they learned to traverse it in relative safety. Relative, being the operative word. Barring that first journey, Harrow had never spent more than a minute and a half physically in the River.

It was as bloody and disorienting as ever, but the tomb called to her like a beacon of familiarity, and Harrow forged ahead with determination born of mingled hope and despair. When she surfaced again, it was through the icy saltwater which surrounded the island on which was built the mausoleum. She hauled herself to the shore, and the moment she left the water, her lyctoral body threw off the chill and exhaustion of swimming those frigid waters with terrifying efficiency. She should have been gasping on the shore, painstakingly restoring each cold-burned cell to health, but instead she climbed straight to her feet, and walked beneath familiar pillars, fully grown feet retreading the smaller icy footprints she had left behind when last she passed this way. She walked into the mausoleum, and approached the bier.

The chains were snapped, the coffin empty. Where once had lain the frozen body who had haunted Harrow for almost half of her life, there was now nothing but a sword. With mindless confusion, she hauled herself into the coffin, as though the Body was only hiding, and would reveal herself upon closer inspection. From her new vantage point, Harrow still could not see the Body, but she noticed flimsy fluttering towards the foot of the hollow in the ice where the body had lain.

Thinking perhaps that her beloved had left her a note, Harrow reached for the flimsy, only to drop it as though burned when she saw that she held not a piece of correspondence, but an image of an implausibly well-endowed woman in a scanty approximation of cohort uniform. The image was titled “Frontline Titties of the Fifth.”

There was only so much one mind could take. She had been fatally stabbed, and her brain had rewritten itself with months of suppressed memories. She had been exorcised, come face to face with an ancient legend of the Ninth House, and briefly reunited with her cavalier only to have Gideon's spirit cruelly snatched away. She had traversed the River twice, and entered a tomb it should have been impossible for her to penetrate, only to discover that the corpse which her entire existence was devoted to keeping interred and insensate had gotten up and walked away. And then – the final insult to all this injury – she had been accosted by wholly unexpected breasts. Harrow did the only thing she could; she fainted.


	8. Gideon

Gideon awoke, as if from a very long, and very strange, dream. She was lying on the cot in her penitent’s cell, looking up at the ceiling she had woken to every morning for most of her life. For a moment, she was disoriented - had it all been a dream? Canaan house, the lyctor trials, Harrow…

But no - the room, however familiar, was dimmer than it should have been, as though her eyes had become accustomed to brighter lighting, and when she looked around, the cell was bare of what few personal effects she’d managed to accumulate over the years; no sword, no magazines or comics, and most concerningly, no clothes. 

She wasn’t naked entirely under her familiar scratchy blankets, but rather more skin was in contact with the rough sheets than should have been. (Rather less of the internal workings of her chest were exposed than memory suggested should have been, either, but she did _not_ want to think about that) She stood, and found that she was dressed in a thin cotton shift, uncomfortably tight around her biceps, but otherwise hanging loose and shapeless around her body, falling to mid-thigh.

A stray draft sent prickles up her spine, and she reached around behind her to confirm with fingers what the air had already told her. The smock was backless, aside from some ribbony nonsense tied behind the neck to keep it from falling off entirely. What sort of weirdo would construct clothes so unflattering as to completely hide her if-she-did-say-so-herself truly epic pectorals, abdominals, and tits (the tits she acknowledged to be more through luck of the draw, but the muscles she’d worked damn hard on), yet leave her ass completely exposed?

Then it hit her; it was _her_ ass hanging out of this ridiculous garment - her biceps straining at its seams (which should have been obvious - Harrow’s biceps couldn’t stretch a sock). She held a hand up to her face, and was comforted beyond measure to see the familiar broad palms and short nails, the callouses left from years of handling her sword. 

She crossed the cell in a couple of steps, to stare into the mirror, and there she was! Red hair and all. Except…

“What the fuck happened to my eyes?”

There was the sound of someone scrambling to their feet on the floor outside her cell, and then the door opened, and Gideon turned around to see Camilla Hect standing in her doorway.

“You shouldn’t be awake,” the Sixth house cavalier said, in her familiar no-nonsense tones. “But then, that isn’t the first time I’ve said that to you. You also shouldn’t ’nt be alive at all, and it isn’t the first time I’ve said that either, so I suppose I should stop expecting you to behave like a normal person.”

“That’s the Gideon Nav guarantee,” Gideon quipped absently, turning back to continue staring at herself in the mirror.

“None of that,” Camilla said, brusquely, but not unkindly. “Sit down; I need to check your pulse and your reflexes, and then we can go speak to the Warden. He can’t wait to talk to you.”

Gideon allowed herself to be led back to the bed, and sat obediently, allowing Camilla to press fingers to her wrist and neck. Her obedience was testament to how completely stupid things had been; she was just too overwhelmed to protest.

She did yelp in surprise as Camilla whacked the fleshy spot under her patella with a baton she’d produced seemingly from nowhere. Camilla ignored her outburst, but observed with satisfaction the corresponding twitch of Gideon’s leg.

Next, she pulled down the loose neckline of Gideon’s backless gown, exposing a wholly chaste few inches of chest. To Gideon’s supreme relief, she stopped well short of uncovering the swell of her breasts. She’d never thought of the Sixth House cavalier that way (or, no more than she did automatically with any vaguely plausible prospect - ‘female and in her age range’ was a rare enough thing in her experience that it wasn’t worth ruling _anyone_ out without due consideration) and she wasn’t sure she was in a fit state to start now.

Camilla stared with interest at what Gideon would have thought was entirely the least interesting portion of her chest, but appeared satisfied with what she saw, and let go of the hem before standing.

“Oh, the Warden is going to love this.” Camilla said, seemingly to herself, and then, to Gideon “Come along then.”

“What, like this? Look, I’m not exactly shy, but in case you didn’t realise, we’re in the Ninth. Why are you in the Ninth, by the way? No, wait, I don’t want to know. It’s been a hell of a day, and frankly my brain doesn’t have space for anything else ridiculous. Anyway. I can’t walk around like this! Everyone here is super old, and half the nuns would drop dead of a heart attack on the spot at the sight of my uncovered backside.”

“What? Oh, I see the problem. Look, you really were not supposed to be awake just yet; we weren’t even sure we’d be able to get you back into your body, and well, we aren’t quite prepared. Wrap yourself in that blanket for now, Ninth, and we’ll go find you something to eat. If I remember rightly from the last time I thought you ought to be dead, you’ve probably got quite an appetite.”

“But… the nuns..”

“Are no longer here. The Ninth house has been entirely evacuated, and they’re working on the other houses now. Alecto has been really quite reasonable about waiting, all things considered. Look, there are exactly five people here - for a given value of ‘people’, anyway - and all of them have bigger things to worry about than seeing you without your underwear”

Grudgingly, and aware that she was still being uncharacteristically bidabble, Gideon threw her blanket over her shoulders, covering her exposed back and ass, and followed the other cavalier out into the hallway. It was strange walking the chilly Ninth House floors barefoot. Stranger still venturing outside her cell without a bandeau - something she hadn't done since the first strike of puberty had made it uncomfortable to run, fight, or even just exercise unsupported.

In the brighter lighting outside her cell, Gideon suddenly noticed the lambent, unblemished grey of Camilla’s eyes - so different to the muddy grey-brown she remembered. Cogs attempted to start turning in her mind, but they didn’t get very far at all before grinding to a halt, her brain rather too fried by recent events to manage much in the way of complex thought.

“Hang on. You’re not a necromancer.”

“Neither are you, which I must admit is a surprise, given… well, everything”

“No, I mean your eyes. You’ve got Sextus’s eyes.”

“And you appear to have the Reverend Daughter’s eyes, which is really quite a fascinating development.” Camilla said, cryptically, before striding off down the hallway, leaving Gideon to follow in puzzled haste. When she saw where Camilla was going, however, she stopped.

“Nope. Nah. No way. I’m not going down there. I hate it down there.”

“I’ll admit the decor lacks a certain something, but come along. There’s nothing in the tomb to hurt you. Not that you’re usually scared of much at all.” Camilla said, not unsympathetically, and then with just a hint of impatience when Gideon still made no move to follow, “Come _along_ Ninth. Don’t you want to know what’s going on?”

“Lady, there is so much going on that I’ve basically given up on understanding any of it ever, but sure. As long as there’s something decent to wear - and something to eat, I _am_ starving - I’ll follow you into hell.”

“We’re rather hoping to avoid hell entirely, but good to know.” Camilla said, mildly, leading the way to the chambers surrounding the locked tomb.

  
  



	9. Gideon

Gideon’s reunion with the other Canaan House survivors was a mixed affair. Palamedes she hugged with unabashed affection, too delighted to see him to stop and wonder at his being more than just a skeletal hand. 

For Gideon, who was basically entirely new to the whole concept of hugging, or really, any physical affection of a non-horny nature (and if she was honest, even her knowledge of that was purely theoretical) and who had additionally been without a body at all for quite some time, it was embarrassingly difficult to let go again once she had her arms around the Sixth House necromancer. 

Sextus was remarkably tolerant of this, but then, Gideon figured anyone who’d once been lonely enough to resort to hugging _Harrowhark Nonagesimus_ probably had a pretty good understanding of what Gideon was feeling right now. Honestly she was more surprised that Camilla didn’t intervene; the Sixth House cavalier was not known to be especially sanguine about people getting too close to her necromancer. 

Gideon only released Palamedes when a prickling in her tear ducts warned her that she was at risk of bawling her eyes out. The next to greet her was Coronabeth, who pulled her into a rather less platonic embrace, pressing her lips to Gideon's in a brief, fierce kiss, before letting her go and taking a step back to look over Gideon’s body - eyes lingering unselfconsciously on Gideon’s bare legs. 

Gideon sincerely hoped that the lacklustre Ninth House lighting hid her blush. 

“Ninth!” Corona said, “you have no idea how good it is to see someone new!” The (former?) Crown Princess of Ida spoke with the breathless intensity Gideon remembered from Canaan House, which had the power to whip her hormones into a storm at the best of times, and Gideon was most certainly not at her best. 

She felt weak at the knees, and didn’t know whether she wanted to return Coronabeth's kiss, or go back to her cell and hide forever. She was saved from collapsing into a wet heap of aroused confusion by the appearance of the Second House necromancer. 

Judith Deuteros immediately stepped in front of Gideon, posture as rigid as ever, and demanded “what news of the Emperor?” Which killed the mood as effectively as a very cold shower.

“Leave her be,” Camilla said reproachfully “we’re all well aware that you remain a faithful servant of the Resurrecting King, but given that Gideon has just undergone something of a resurrection herself, I think she’s entitled to some forbearance.”

“Quite,” said Palamedes, his voice outwardly as affable as ever, but with a chilly undercurrent. Gideon was somehow not surprised to see Judith’s military training kick in apparently automatically in response to the command in Palamedes’ tone, and the necromancer took herself away to the side of the room. 

Coronabeth took Gideon’s hand and led her to a table piled with food. Her growling stomach thankfully drowned out any other organs which might have wanted to linger on the feeling of Coronabeth’s strong, lightly calloused hand in hers, and she sat down to eat.

Palamedes conferred briefly with Camilla, before sitting down to join Gideon and Coronabeth. Camilla took up her customary position just behind her necromancer’s chair, casting the occasional quelling look at Judith whenever she looked like she might be about to speak or approach the table

Something in Gideon’s expression was clearly still communicating _not right now_ , because other than Judith Deuteros’s unsubtle attempts to catch her eye, and the Sixth House’s incessant medical questions - any pain? Ringing in the ears? Doubled vision? Pain when urinating? Which was the point at which Gideon had noped out entirely and stopped answering, focusing instead on shoveling as much food into her face as she could - no one had pressed her to talk. 

Once she’d consumed enough calories to kick-start her brain, Gideon realised that there were only four people here - not the five Camilla had mentioned - and it didn’t take a genius to guess who the missing person ‘for a given value of person’ was. It should have been hard to believe that the body from the Locked Tomb was up and about even though she’d seen it herself, when they’d somehow managed to stuff her back inside her body, but Gideon’s only thought was a weary _of course. Of course_ the Tomb was open. _Of course_ the Body walked. Harrow _always_ got her way in the end.

As Gideon was just starting to acknowledge the possibility that there were limits to the amount of food she could consume, the Body walked in, and there was something distinctly off about the way she walked. It was as though someone had taken Gideon’s strength, Camilla’s predatory grace, and Coronabeth’s sheer physical charisma, mixed them together, magnified them by a billion, and stuffed them into someone who’d never actually learned to walk. 

She had the same sense of incredible age and power that the emperor had, but where Gideon found god to be repulsive on some visceral level, as though something inside him had died during the resurrection, and proceeded to rot for a myriad, the Body radiated immense power in a way that was honestly captivating. Though Gideon’s fist still ached to punch her for her part in messing with Harrow’s head, Gideon had to admit that she could understand her necromancer's obsession. 

The eyes were kind of creepy. It wasn’t like she didn’t know why the Body shared her eyes, but honestly, the explanation only made it more uncomfortable. If it was weird seeing someone who was sort of hot, in an untouchable, way-out-of-her-league kind of way who also had identical eyes to her own, it was even weirder knowing that those eyes had originally belonged to Gideon's dad.

“Alecto?” Palamedes asked

“She’s here,” the Body - Alecto - said in a voice Gideon wasn’t sure she would ever get used to. Before anyone could respond, Alecto had already walked away, towards the entrance to the Locked Tomb. Everyone else looked to Gideon, expectantly.

“Uh, who is here?”

“Your _necromancer_ is here,” Camilla said, in a tone which seemed to fondly append _‘you idiot’_ , unspoken, to the end of her reply.

“Harrow? But how… why…”

“Once the process had completed, it wouldn’t be safe for Harrowhark to remain on the Mithraeum,” Palamedes answered, “your eyes would be a dead giveaway to any of the older lyctors, or - god forbid - the emperor himself.” The Master Warden of the Sixth House seemed to reflect for a moment on what he'd just said. “Perhaps a poor choice of words. Regardless, Alecto said that she was able to communicate with the Reverend Daughter and advise her to return here at her earliest convenience. I can only surmise that this is her now.”

“Yeah, about that,” Gideon said, “you aren’t wrong - they all completely freaked out when they saw my eyes. You would not believe the trouble it caused. But if the idea was to get Harrow here before anyone saw anything incriminating, I’m afraid that ship has not just sailed, it has sailed, docked, sailed again, gotten into a space battle, been blown up entirely, and is now cosmic shrapnel smeared over, like, a dozen galaxies.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, and then Palamedes opened his mouth to ask a question, but before he could, Gideon had risen and followed Alecto out of the room, with surprising speed, for someone who never ran if she could help it.


	10. Gideon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I was typing this out, everything Alecto said was written in one of those cool distorted horror fonts, but that isn't an option on AO3 (and would probably be a real pain in the arse accessibility-wise), so it's just normal font here - but you should totally imagine her having scary drippy cosmic horror voice

Once they were out of earshot of the others, Alecto turned and cautioned, “she is exhausted.” 

When Gideon didn’t respond, Alecto continued, “she was unconscious when I left her, but should wake soon. She needs to rest; do try not to...” a tiny frown; a pause while Alecto seemed to consider her word choice carefully, “please do not allow her to exert herself.”

“As if Harrowhark Nonagesimus ever gave a shit about what she was _allowed_ to do?” Gideon scoffed. “Look - you’ve been hanging around her long enough; you can’t have been paying attention if you think she’s going to listen to what _I_ say.”

“I think maybe _you_ haven’t been paying attention, cavalier,” Alecto said, “you may find that she surprises you.”

A surprise from the Reverend Daughter usually involved some sort of osseous atrocity, so Gideon tried not to think about this too closely.

“What’s wrong with her, anyway? Why’s she so tired?”

“It cost her much to return here. Even with the wards on the tomb broken, the very stones resist penetration.” 

Gideon stifled a snicker at ‘penetration’, but didn’t otherwise interrupt as Alecto continued, ”I had thought she would return to her rooms, perhaps, or the chapel. The way would have been easier for her, if she had.”

Gideon laughed. The laugh lasted just a tad too long, but given everything that had happened, Gideon thought she could be excused some minor hysterics. 

Still, it was good to realise that Alecto could be quite so astonishingly oblivious - she clearly didn’t have a clue, and therefore anything she might have implied about Gideon and Harrow could be safely ignored.

“All this hype, and it turns out you’re a fucking idiot,” Gideon said. This was probably neither the time nor the place to have this conversation, especially if Harrow was waiting. In fact, the sheer energy thrumming from Alecto’s body was probably a good hint that this was not a safe conversation to have at any point, but Gideon had been through a lot, and it was a relief to put aside complex thoughts and feelings on her necromancer, her parentage, and her resurrection. 

In short, it was goddamned satisfying to just be _pissed_.

“Of course she came here, you moron. She’s in love with you! She’s been in love with you since she was ten!”

“Many of the Reverend Mothers and Fathers have cared for me, throughout the ages,” Alecto said vaguely, spectacularly missing the point. “I could feel it sometimes, through my dreamings. 

“Anastasia knew what she was doing when she made her cult, I’ll give her that; it takes a complex and multi-layered gospel to invoke fear and love and duty in equal measure, and I don’t think anything less would have sustained this installation. 

“I do wonder that her congregation never recognised their apostasy. It is not possible to love God while also worshipping His death. I wonder even more that John allowed it to continue, but then, he always had a sentimental side. Perhaps it was a sop to his conscience, that I would not pass my eternal imprisonment alone. 

“I understand that my most recent priestess is unfailingly devout - but I still had not expected that she would return to the tomb itself.”

“You’re even stupider than I thought,” Gideon said, refusing to be sidetracked by whatever religious nonsense the Body was spouting. These old fucks were all just as crazy as each other, and every last one of them seemed to love the sound of their own voice way too much - apparently being unconscious for most of the last myriad hadn’t exempted Alecto from this trait. “She doesn’t love you as some sort of fucked up god figure… well, she does, but she doesn’t _just_ love you like that. 

Alecto tilted her head to one side in confusion. It was not quite a _human_ gesture. “I don’t understand”

“Maybe if she’d never got a look at you, she might have loved _The Sacred Mystery of the Locked Tomb_ , but once she set eyes on you, she was rather more interested in the sacred mysteries inside your pants.”

“But the only thing inside my pants is me.”

“Yes…” Gideon drawled, waiting for her to get the point.

“There’s nothing mysterious about my anatomy. I’m told it’s perfectly standard. Well, as much as these things can be standardised. My reproductive organs are internal, rather than external, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

Gideon had to take a moment at that.

“You know what, I was wrong!” She said. “You make the perfect couple! In fact, you should get married. I’ll start the invitations now: _Miss Nonagesimus and Miss-The-Fucking-Point invite you…_ ”

“ _Couple_?” Alecto interrupted. “You mean like Cyrus and Valancy? But I have no intention of coupling with anyone!” There was genuine consternation on Alecto’s face at this.

“You might have thought of that before you decided to spend all your time hanging around in her bedroom.”

“I watched over her to ensure that she did not inadvertently betray our cause, and also to provide comfort; the task she set herself in preserving your spirit was impossibly difficult. I had hoped that my company might make things easier for her, and, well, people have always referred to me as maternal.”

“If by maternal you mean _MILF_ ,” said Gideon. “Look, lady, you’re too old to pull the innocent virgin act. I know what all those gross old lyctors got up to. You can’t tell me you’re honestly naive enough not to have noticed that Harrowhark Nonagesimus has the hots for you.”

“But I didn’t notice anything of the sort! Had I known her feelings were of an amorous nature, believe me, I would not have fostered such a bond between us. I had hoped only for… a witness, you might say. 

“I am more than ready to end the life of the man who calls himself God, even knowing that doing so will end my life too, but it would be nice, not to be forgotten when I am finally laid to rest. My siblings are gone, five dead, three lost in madness and vengeance, and I will not survive our retribution, but tale of it should continue beyond me, as a warning to any who think to retread this path.”

Those numbers rang a small bell in the back of Gideon’s mind, but given the choice between a conversation about mathematics, and a conversation about sex, Gideon’s choice was a foregone conclusion.

“So you’re not interested in playing hide-the-bone with Harrow then?”

“I haven’t the faintest clue how one would even go about _being_ interested. Before the resurrection… let’s just say that when my kind dare to touch, the results are nothing less than apocalyptic. We’ve always been incredibly disciplined about keeping our distance; our laws aren’t your silly flesh laws, they are physical, and they are absolute.”

“It’s illegal for you to touch anyone? What, do you have some, like, totally disgusting crotch plague or something? Sextus would fix that up for you in no time, I’m sure.”

Something shifted in Alecto’s face, becoming remote and unsettling in a way Gideon couldn’t quite put her finger on. When Alecto spoke, it was in an entirely different voice, one which was completely flat, and yet still conveyed an infinite frozen fury.

“I am not _diseased_ … I am the spirit of a heavenly body trapped in a speck of meat and shackled to my murderer so that he can mine my death for power. Once, my every scream was a hurricane. I wept hot stone and my tears boiled my seas and blackened my skies. You smelted the metal of my bones and burned the oils of my blood until I sickened and grew weak. My fevers were cleansing wildfires, and yet you would not die! You speak to me of love. I could no more love the Reverend Daughter than you could love the maggots which wait to feast upon your eyes when you are dead.”

That was rather closer to comparing Harrow to a maggot than Gideon would usually let anyone but herself get away with, but Alecto was coldly terrifying, and Gideon - who had never before met a line she didn’t itch to cross - was suddenly concerned she’d finally blundered over one she really shouldn’t have. She said nothing, waiting with the tightly-wound paralysis of a prey animal. 

Then Alecto smiled, and her smile was the sun rising over Canaan house, blinding in its intensity. Her boundless rage and strange, ancient grief had vanished as abruptly as they had surfaced, and she suddenly seemed no older than Gideon herself.

“Still, I suppose there are some advantages to being made out of meat. Legs are definitely fun. And fingers. Maybe I _should_ couple with my priestess after all. I bet it’s a bit like stabbing someone, and I really do enjoy that. I’ve never put my fingers inside someone’s preexisting orifices. I wonder if it’s less… gooey?”

“Not if you’re doing it right,” Gideon said, but the innuendo was half-hearted at best. In fact she wasn’t sure it even qualified as innuendo at all. She had no idea what had just happened, but if she had to hazard a guess, it kind of looked like she’d managed to piss off a resurrection beast in a human body, and cock block herself, all in one fell swoop. _Great going, idiot._ She thought.

Not that she had any interest in Harrow, Gideon quickly reminded herself, stuffing any suggestion that she _had_ a cock to block, where the Reverend Daughter was concerned, into the ‘Never Happened’ box in her head, and swiftly retconning her dismay into a cavalier’s understandable protectiveness at the thought of her necromancer getting boned by an unbelievably powerful eldritch horror with a penchant for non-consensual stabbing.

 _Yeah. That’s definitely all it was_.

Alecto continued into the tomb, and for lack of any better ideas, Gideon followed.

She entered the tomb, and it was so cold she was surprised that her bare feet didn’t freeze to the ground with each step. Alecto seemed unaffected by the cold, and oddly, Gideon found that the chill didn’t really bother her either. She remembered shivering on the cot in her cell, teeth chattering, those times when Harrow had turned off her heating in punishment for one trumped up offence or another, and feeling the cold ache in her bones. She could tell that it was much colder here than anywhere she’d ever been, but she wasn’t even shivering.

Neither was Harrow, when Gideon found her. The necromancer was curled up unconscious on the bier, her slender body dwarfed within the hollow where Alecto had previously lain. For all the complexity of Gideon’s feelings about Alecto, she had to admit, the unfathomable nightmare creature had muscles for _days_. 

Harrow lay completely still. If it hadn’t been for the white cloud of Harrow’s breath, Gideon might have worried that she was dead. She was curled up around a sword - not Gideon’s beloved two-hander, which she sadly realised had been lost in the River, but one which was almost indistinguishable. Would, in fact, have appeared completely identical to anyone still somewhat hazy on the concept of a ‘pommel’. 

Discarded on the floor was… Gideon bent to pick up the flimsy, and was startled to discover that it was a magazine of a pornographic nature. 

“Frontline Titties of the Fifth isn’t even a real publication,” she blurted in confusion, “I made it up to annoy Crux”

“Your belongings couldn’t be recovered from Canaan House when you died. We had to improvise.”

“Improvise what?”

“We needed to attract your spirit, but you weren’t in the River long enough to hunger for even the oldest or freshest blood. I presented the problem for discussion, and it was concluded that blades and bosoms were the items with the most appropriate sympathetic resonance to appeal to your spirit, and so I contrived their creation. I was sceptical, I admit, but it was clearly effective. Anyway. I shall allow you to have your reunion undisturbed.”

Alecto made as if to leave, and then stopped, took the flimsy from Gideon’s hands, and walked out of the tomb, calling over her shoulder with what Gideon was almost certain was an air of mischief, “you really have given me a lot to think about, cavalier. I think perhaps I’ll do some reading…”

Gideon wasn’t quite sure if she was turned on or terrified by that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone is a font nerd like me and is curious, I used a couple different fonts for Alecto (because just one wasn't chaotic enough for what I was envisioning), so her dialogue ended up being an unholy mashup of Bad Signal, SoRunDown-Regular and Lost Lubbock Motels


	11. Harrow

When Harrow awoke, she found that she was hallucinating. This wasn’t _precisely_ a new development, but she had hoped that once the block she’d put on her memories of Gideon had gone, her infirmity would also resolve itself. Unfortunately, it appeared that her insanity had merely changed focus.

She could see Gideon standing over her, but while physical evidence was never sufficient to rule out a hallucination, it could certainly rule one in. Not only was the spectre of her cavalier not showing any signs of discomfort, despite the frigid temperature, and her wholly inadequate clothing, but while Gideon appeared to her eyes, Harrow's lyctoral senses detected no other presence in the room. In fact, there were only two living bodies in the whole Ninth House, which Harrow knew should worry her, but she was so _tired_... 

Most damning of all, whereas the Body had recently been sporting Gideon’s yellow irises, this hallucination had eyes of the almost-black shade of dark brown which was classically Ninth House in a way Gideon had never been.

Apparently her mind’s way of dealing with Gideon’s permanent destruction was to conjure her a Gideon who belonged properly in the Ninth House, one who would, perhaps, have shown her Reverend Daughter the proper submission and adoration from birth, and who would never have tried to leave her.

Of course, that was also a Gideon who would have possessed no innate defence against nerve gas, and would therefore not have survived beyond infancy. Not that the true Gideon’s survival had come to much - she had joined the other dead sons and daughters of her House in the end.

Harrow closed her eyes against the concern on fake-Gideon’s face, hoping to return to the oblivion of unconsciousness.

“Oh come on Nonagesimus. I know you’re awake. If you’re going to steal my eyes, the least you could do is open them.”

“It’s true then,” Harrow said despairingly. “My eyes have changed? I am a true lyctor? You are dead?” Months of practice speaking to the Body made it surprisingly easy for Harrow to speak freely to her hallucination.

“Woah, okay. In order - yes, your eyes have changed, fuck if I know what that means, and no, I’m not dead. I know, I was shocked too! Look, I know we’ve got a lot to catch up on, but before we get into all that I don’t suppose you have any secret stashes of spare robes tucked away anywhere? I feel ridiculous. And I’m slightly concerned that Coronabeth might be unable to resist my epic quads if I don’t cover them up soon”

“Lord have mercy upon me and save me from this manifestation of my baser instincts!” Harrow cried, driven beyond distraction by the continued variations upon this theme. She’d had quite enough of Gideon and Coronabeth. 

“Huh?” Gideon said, appearing confused. Harrow ignored this.

The fact remained that however… complex… her feelings for her cavalier, Gideon was dead, and therefore not a good candidate for any sort of carnal indulgence. Corpse lust was not something Harrow condoned, even if Gideon’s body had not been lost. And as for Coronabeth… she could see why someone like _Gideon_ would be interested, but Harrow found her appeal entirely too obvious to bother with, so she did not know why her mind insisted on continuing to imagine these things.

“Why are you wearing a blanket?” Harrow asked, waspishly, hoping that pointing out the sheer ridiculousness of her hallucination would force it to go away, or at least appear more decently clothed.

“I guess I got blood and, like, bits of lung all over the clothes I was wearing.”

Harrow flinched, but soldiered on.

“No, I mean, why would you appear to me dressed like _that_?”

“Didn’t you hear me? I don’t have any other clothes!”

“You are an hallucination, and therefore not subject to any such limitation. I insist that you either dress appropriately or leave me alone.”

“A… what?” Gideon sounded truly incensed by this, which made sense. Harrow was furious with herself for allowing Gideon to die, so it made sense that her projection of her guilt would express that anger. “You self-absorbed, self-centred, self-involved hateful little nun! I _am_ real, you idiot. Now get up and talk to me, or I’ll show you just how real my fists are.”

Harrow did not respond.

“Look, your girlfriend is here, if that helps. I even put in a good word for you - I think”

“Ianthe?” Harrow blurted without thinking, and instantaneously hated herself for it. ‘Girlfriend’ was perhaps the least accurate word for the relationship between herself and the other lyctor. She was only grateful that no one - well, no one real - had been there to hear her embarrassing slip.

“Uh, no, and also _ew_. That bitch isn’t good enough for you, Nonagesimus, and you know it. She absolutely isn’t good for you. Even if she does have a bone arm. I know you get a boner for bones.”

“Good grief, Griddle! I know you adore the sound of your own voice, but as you are dead and I am the only one able to hear you, would you please shut up?”

“Still not dead. Look, I know you’ve been living in crazytown for a while, but could you please get with the picture? I’m sort of freaking out a bit myself and being told I’m a figment of your imagination really isn’t helping. Come on Harrow… your brain never was up to much! You’re too much of a bone magician to think up muscle definition _this_ good.” At this, Gideon dropped the blanket and posed, flexing her biceps, but Harrow ignored her.

“You know, Coronabeth kissed me, and Palamedes gave me a hug. You’re really going to act like you give less of a shit about me being back than they do?”

“If I thought for a moment that you were real, Griddle,” Harrow said tiredly, finally meeting Gideon’s eyes, “I would cartwheel out of this tomb and do backflips off the top tier of Drearburh in a sheer excess of joy”

“You couldn’t do a cartwheel if your life depended on it.”

“Accurate, but as you are merely a manifestation of my own grief and guilt, I won’t be called upon to perform any such feat, and therefore my physical shortcomings are hardly relevant.”

“Harrow. I am tired, I am half naked, and I have just come back from the dead, which is quite enough to deal with, without your bullshit. Would you please pull your head out of your ass and stop pretending I’m not real before I have to do something drastic?”

Harrow simply sighed, and turned onto her back, closing her eyes again and lying still, fully looking like she intended to stay there until she froze and replaced the tomb’s missing occupant.


	12. Gideon

Once, Gideon would have punched Harrow - and to hell with the skeletal retribution she’d have copped for making such an attack on the Reverend Daughter’s sacred person - or perhaps she would have picked her up and thrown her bodily into the icy waters surrounding the mausoleum. Certainly, whatever she’d have done would have come firmly under the heading of ‘violence’. 

Now, though, as she considered the still body of her necromancer, Gideon saw that Harrow was small and sad and unutterably, unexpectedly, dear. There were new lines etched into her face since the last time Gideon had been in a position to look at her from the outside. 

In this unguarded moment, with no one to see her, and with an unprecedented opportunity to observe her necromancer without being watched in return, Gideon took the time to look. To really look at Harrow with new - perhaps actually, literally new - eyes.

Harrow’s face was bare of paint. Bare also of the smears and gobbets of space bee which Gideon had been unable to avoid covering herself in, when she’d worn that skin, which was probably for the best. 

Her time in the river had washed Harrow’s body clean of all trace of that fight, though the clothes still showed the depredations of dozens of murderous insectoid horrors. They were tattered, almost indecently ragged in places, and Gideon saw without surprise that it would have been possible to catalogue each of her necromancer’s bones, without needing to strip the body of its flesh. Harrow was so painfully thin that Gideon was honestly astonished that she’d managed to lift her two-hander at all, with such emaciated muscles. 

In repose, stripped of all drive and animation, Harrow was an inelegant heap of angles, her harsh lines and sharp points practically inorganic in their keenness, until Gideon could almost pretend it was not a human body she was looking at. 

Without layers of cloth and paint to shroud her, Harrow was no larger than Jeannemary had been, and Gideon staggered beneath the memory of that small dead weight in her arms. She had a sudden, stupid desire to hold Harrow, to feel that she was alive, and push away the memory of the girl she had failed with the body of someone she might still have the chance to save.

Gideon suppressed the urge. Even if there had been the slightest chance that Harrow would have responded to being picked up with anything less than a bone shank to Gideon’s kidney, she wasn’t yet prepared to let go of this opportunity to truly look at her necromancer, without Harrow catching her looking.

For all that Gideon was half-god, she was only human. Human, and still in the process of fighting the final skirmishes of a years-long battle with puberty, and so the part of her which was always distracted by the sight of bare flesh couldn't help assessing the flesh she saw now. Harrow was no Coronabeth. She wouldn’t have made it onto even the final page of one of Gideon’s magazines. Slender to the point of androgyny, she didn’t tick a single one of Gideon’s boxes, which all centered around a common theme of soft and sensual abundance. The only thing _Harrow_ had in abundance was sharp edges. And yet, Gideon felt a wholly unexpected stirring, one she’d previously only associated with her skin mags.

She was not the slightest bit prepared to deal with this, so she turned her attention back to Harrow’s silly, pointy little face. She’d hoped that the reminder that this was the _Reverend Daughter,_ and therefore the worst possible candidate for any sort of crush, would stop her hormones in their tracks, but instead a tidal wave of feelings crept up and threatened to swamp her.

Gideon had never possessed the emotional vocabulary to articulate, even to herself, exactly how she felt about Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Even if those feelings had actually made sense, and weren’t just an ungainly knot of contradictions, it wasn’t worth trying to unravel them, when Gideon had always known that Harrow didn’t feel the same. What was the point of putting in the work to understand her own heart, when it would probably only get that heart broken?

So Gideon had expressed her feelings in the only way she knew how; ruining Harrow’s day at any opportunity, while also jealously guarding her from any real harm. The proximity, the attention, the intimacy of perpetual conflict, it had been enough. Then she'd died, and rather than disappearing in an ecstatic climax of devotion to her necromancer, she'd lived months in the darkness, looking out through Harrow's eyes, and emerged to a world where she had everything she'd ever wanted - her parents, her sword, her freedom, and none of it had meant a thing, because Harrow hadn't been there. So the strange, violent holding pattern they'd been in all their lives, that had been enough for so long, wasn’t enough anymore. 

There was a word, she knew, for the ache in her chest whenever they were apart. For the way Gideon’s awareness always centred around Harrow, no matter what else might be going on. There was a word for knowing you’d do anything for someone’s attention, for feeling that you may as well not exist without their eyes upon you, for craving even their cruelty, because at least it was _something_. There was a word for being willing to die for someone, for wanting to be consumed by them entirely, for being willing to do anything, anything at all, just because they asked. 

She was starting to suspect that the word she was looking for might be ‘love’.

Before her brain could catch up with what she was doing and abort this most stupid of ideas, Gideon bent over the icy coffin and kissed Harrow’s lips, feeling like a prince in a fairy tale. She braced for the feeling of cold skeletal hands dragging her away, but instead, after a moment's shocked paralysis, Harrow's own hands, only slightly warmer, and barely less bony than skeletal ones would have been, gripped Gideon's arms, pulling her closer.

Neither of them had ever kissed anyone before, not really, and any love they possessed was built on the most brutal kind of tenderness, and so their kiss was a ragged, grisly thing, all bloody lips and sharp teeth. Something inside Gideon ruptured at the feeling of Harrow's hands on her bare skin. She tasted salt tears mingling with the metal tang of blood, and did not know if they were hers or Harrow’s.

The kiss ended as they gasped for breath in unconscious unison, but Harrow did not release her, and Gideon did not pull away, and so she felt the movement of Harrow's lips under hers as Harrow said, wonderingly, "you're real?"

Gideon couldn't speak. It was as though everything she'd never said to Harrow had suddenly bloomed into a malignant growth in her chest, choking off both breath and speech. So in reply, she simply kissed Harrow again, trying for gentleness, and only mostly failing. 

Harrow’s grip on her arms relaxed, as if trusting that Gideon would not try to get away. Now, those thin fingers roamed over Gideon's skin, still too desperate to be gentle; as much a claiming of territory as a caress. She traced the strong line of the humerus until it disappeared under Gideon's gown, and then followed it further, picking up the clavicle where it emerged from beneath the fabric. Harrow's fingers were cool from the chill of the tomb, and yet Gideon felt as though they drew burning lines of fire upon her skin.

 _I’m real_ , Gideon thought, and somehow she felt that she hadn’t been, not really, not until Harrow had spoken her reality into being.


	13. Harrow

Harrow’s lips parted unconsciously, her tongue hesitating on the threshold of Gideon’s mouth, flirting with the idea of exploring that inner space, without quite daring to seek entrance. Her fingers followed the ripple of trapezius under her cavalier’s skin, seeking the familiar column of the spine. 

Gideon’s body was as impenetrable to her as any lyctor’s; an absence in her perception which had led Harrow to the conclusion that Gideon was nothing but a mirage, until her cavalier had kissed her. Now each place their bodies touched was a candle in the darkness, illuminating muscle and bone beneath the skin. She felt the rhythmic clench of Gideon’s beating heart, miraculously whole and unbroken, and counted with reverence each ridge of the thoracic vertebrae, until…

“You aren’t wearing underwear,” she gasped, and their bodies were pressed so close that Gideon’s breath was hers, and her words were swallowed by the heat of Gideon’s lips.

The spine bucked under Harrow’s fingers, bowed by a sudden laugh.

“I did mention my clothing situation,”

This was enough to allow some semblance of rational thought to seep back into Harrow’s mind, and she froze, trembling, arrested by sudden overwhelm. It was as though her entire self was suffering a sea-change; she was unmade and reborn with each breath. Her heart was a revenant inside her, and the feelings were exquisite and intolerable in their magnitude.

“Stop,” she managed, “I’m not… I can’t… it’s too much.”

Gideon made to pull away, but Harrow clung on, begging just as desperately, _please don’t go_. That contact was the only thing she had to hold onto - the only thing proving that Gideon was real and alive - and she was irrationally terrified that if she let go, Gideon would be dead again.

“I won’t go anywhere,” Gideon said, huskily. Harrow could hear an echo of her own trembling in her cavalier’s voice. “Just tell me what you need.”

“I need to touch you. I need to know you’re really here with me.” Harrow was too far gone, had gained and lost Gideon too many times, too fast; she was beyond caring about the vulnerability she exposed. She only needed Gideon to stay. As long as Gideon stayed, anything else could be borne.

“My body is yours, my tenebrous majesty.” The words were familiar, but the tone was not. Where once the title would have been a mockery, this time it was a prayer, an oath. Gideon’s voice was low and harsh with tears, and more; fidelity, fealty, a hot longing that Harrow could not name. 

Harrow sat up on the edge of the tomb; the ice beneath her no discomfort when set against the burning of her blood. Gideon’s hips were wide and solid, and beautifully real, and it took a moment for Harrow to arrange herself so that Gideon stood bracketed by her necromancer’s thighs, but Harrow couldn’t bear to put even a femur’s length between them. 

Haltingly, Harrow reached out her hands to cup the familiar line of Gideon’s mandible. She could feel the clenching of her jaw, the quick, harsh breaths and the quivering stillness of a body wound explosively tight. She worried that Gideon's tension indicated that her touch was unwelcome, that her cavalier accepted it only out of a sense of duty, but when she looked into Gideon’s eyes, they met hers unflinchingly, and her pupils were so wide that Harrow almost couldn’t see the fine ring of those ebony irises which should have been gold. 

In a movement so slight, Harrow wasn’t sure it was even conscious, Gideon leaned into Harrow’s hands. They were so close that Harrow was acutely aware of Gideon’s breasts brushing her outstretched arms with each breath, and the mingled heat of their bodies was perceptible, electric, a tropical storm amongst so much ice and stone.

Once she’d pieced together the whole skull in her mind, memorised the sweeping osseous dome, the delicate sutures fusing frontal bone to parietal to occipital, she followed the jawline to the neck, bony structures giving way to muscle and cartilage, with only the spine to give them shape. Gideon swallowed, roughly, a spasm under Harrow's fingers. 

Harrow had always thought she hated Gideon’s easy bulk, had considered her strong frame and ample musculature to be a profanity. Her body was too lush, too ripe, obscene with vitality when set against the backdrop of the withered Ninth House and its cadaverous Reverend Daughter. Even her colours were too bright. Red hair and yellow eyes standing out amongst the Ninth House’s dull monochrome; she was bright, living blood and lymph amongst their bone and ash and char.

The Ninth was a House of bones, not flesh, and yet as Harrow’s hands fell to Gideon’s shoulders, she understood for the first time that Gideon’s body was not a blasphemy. In honing each muscle into lean perfection, Gideon had made of herself a sacrament; the softer tissues a gorgeous living reliquary for the skeleton within.

Harrow moved slowly, watching closely for any trace of hesitation or protest, as she carefully untied the knot holding Gideon's gown together. Her cavalier gave an almost imperceptible nod of assent, body too taut to allow more than the briefest movement, but even that slight gesture was like a shout, with every fibre of Harrow’s being attuned to her cavalier until everything else ceased to exist.

Harrow watched Gideon with more than just her eyes. She felt the quivering of Gideon’s muscles, felt how each successive heartbeat came quicker than the last, her heaving lungs battling to keep up. Gideon’s skin was flushed, her capillaries as helplessly dilated as her pupils, her whole body newly inviting, assailable, defenceless under her necromancer’s touch. Gideon’s naked physicality was an open book beneath her fingers, and every sinew whispered secrets, clamouring urgently for Harrow’s attention. 

Harrow let the gown fall, and Gideon exhaled explosively. It was a breath that wanted to be a laugh, or a cry. A breath that yearned to release the tension between them, but couldn’t. 

Harrow waited until Gideon had inhaled again, a long, shuddering breath, before pressing both hands to her sternum, thin fingers cupped between Gideon’s breasts. It was a gesture which tried to cover the empty ruin of Gideon’s chest, to erase the memory of the railing which had pierced it so cruelly, but there was nothing there to hide. Her sternum was whole, her skin warm and alive under Harrow’s hands, without blemish or scar. Gideon’s body did not not recall its death, even as Harrow had sundered herself forgetting it.

Harrow’s hands were wet. She glanced up, and saw that tears ran down Gideon’s face and fell from her chin to splash upon her necromancer’s fingers, but Gideon did not sob. She did not move, or make a sound. If she wept, it was the wretched, squashed weeping of someone who had long ago learned to cry in miserable silence.

“I was there the whole time,” Gideon whispered, and the words seemed to come from such a long way away. “I saw you butcher yourself. More than saw it; I lived it. I was inside you and you were _broken_. You nearly died, so many times, and I couldn’t do anything to save you. I'm your cavalier, and I couldn't save you.”

Harrow let herself feel the weight of the words. She forced herself to imagine what it must have been like for Gideon, conscious and impotent, trapped in the turmoil of Harrow's mind. What it would mean to swear an oath to protect someone, and then watch, helplessly, as they shattered over and over again. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, and the words seemed so inadequate, but hearing them, Gideon sagged, as though something inside her had been severed, all the tension leeching from her body, leaving her limp and unmoored. She fell to her knees, her head burying itself in the hollow of Harrow’s stomach. Gideon’s hands grasped Harrow’s robes, twisting them within fists clenched bloodlessly tight. She cried in earnest then, heaving and gasping until Harrow thought she might rip herself apart with the violence of it. 

Harrow almost couldn’t bear the pain of those sobs. She ached to provide some sort of comfort, however inadequate, however ill-equipped she was for such a task, but knew instinctively that there was no comfort for an agony so vast. This was not a puzzle to be solved, or a fault to be corrected, but a storm to be weathered, and all that Harrow could do was hold fast and endure it. She would not allow herself to shy away from Gideon’s anguish and nor could she calm the raging tempest of it, but she could bear witness, that Gideon would not face the whirlwind alone. She could make of herself a vessel to carry Gideon safely through.


	14. Gideon

Gideon was coming apart. This weeping was like dying all over again, except this time there was no end; the pain just kept growing and growing, flowing faster and hotter than blood. The tiniest portion of her brain was frustrated and exasperated that she’d completely ruined a moment which had, until that point, been incredibly hot, with the potential for even greater hotness. Most of her, however, was given over to crying like an enormous baby.

She felt as though she’d swallowed something tainted, that maybe she'd been drinking it down her whole life, and now her body was finally purging itself, vomiting up not just the bitterness of her death, or the months of helpless drowning in Harrow’s mind, but everything. Her entire life. Eighteen years in the dark with a bunch of bad nuns, and the weight she’d carried of being the child who hadn’t died, the walking reminder of the Ninth's greatest sin, even when she hadn’t known that was what she was carrying.

Everything inside her with the capacity to love had been smothered under years of isolation, neglect, and contempt, and she was digging through the muck, clawing her way out from under the ashes of her childhood. What emerged was fragile, vulnerable, and terrified, so delicate that Harrow’s frail arms around her felt strong in comparison; her necromancer’s embrace like safe harbour.

When Gideon’s tears had cleansed her of the anger and the shame and the sheer unfairness of her life, she still could not stop crying. She didn’t want to _be_ this person anymore. She couldn’t keep living as nothing more than the stunted product of too much trauma, and not enough love, but she was so raw; all of her confidence had been nothing but a shell, a brittle mask constructed from years of telling _herself_ that she was worthwhile, and good, and had value, because she knew that no one else ever would.

She cried for a new understanding of herself as someone with an immeasurable capacity for love, and no damn clue _how_ to love, or be loved. 

And then, she cried for the person she loved the most. For Harrow, who was born of unthinkable atrocity, a living scream from two hundred dead throats; a blood debt deep enough to drown in. For all the responsibility which had always been on those slim shoulders. For a lifetime of reverence, without affection, for the expectation of greatness given with no room for failure. 

And finally she cried for the sheer improbability that such jagged and broken souls could ever come together without slicing each other bloody. Gideon and Harrow were so different, and yet, at their cores, they were each just caged and frightened animals, lashing out, unable to distinguish between a hand extended in kindness and one raised to strike.

And, at last, she was done. She felt that she had cried an ocean, but now she was possessed of a hollowed-out, exhausted kind of calm. They had overcome so much, her and Harrow, so much more than they ever should have been asked to, and while each of them alone might be nothing but a collection of broken pieces, yoked to one singular excellence - Harrow her necromancy, Gideon her blade - together, she’d bet on them over anything that life could throw at them. And she understood at last - that was the secret of cavaliers and necromancers, wasn’t it? 

Gideon’s nature, more given to action than introspection, reasserted itself, and she came back to herself, newly aware of her body’s many small discomforts. Her eyes were gummy, and her head throbbed. It felt like she’d stuffed her sinus cavity to bursting with lye-soaked wads of cotton and her knees were sore from kneeling so long on the cold hard stone. 

She raised her head from Harrow’s robes, soaked through from her tears, and kissed her necromancer again. This time gentleness came easily, though their kiss was no less bloody for it. Gideon’s lips cracked and split, as though the moisture had been drained from them, each drop of water in her body cried away.

It took a moment for her to find her voice, and a moment more to fashion it into something which sounded properly like herself, with no scratch of abused throat or nasal whine of swollen sinus.

“You’re still here,” Gideon said at last. “I’m impressed. I didn’t think you had it in you. I know you aren’t a fan of, like, fluids, and feelings, and all those wet, squishy, messy things. Or, really, anything that isn’t just bones.”

“I may not care for flesh as a concept, Griddle, but your body, and your flesh, and even your fluids, are more precious to me than I can possibly say.”

“That’s another thing we agree on then, because this is one rocking bod. Though, it sort of feels more like it’s been hit with rocks right now.”

“You ought to be freezing!” Harrow exclaimed, as if she’d only just noticed that her cavalier knelt, naked, on stone covered in a thin sheen of ice. 

She slid off the edge of the tomb and into Gideon’s lap, reaching for the discarded blanket, and when she’d grabbed it, she wrapped it around Gideon’s shoulders. Gideon gave herself a moment to appreciate the weight, the proximity, of the necromancer straddling her thighs, and then a moment more to notice just how little weight there was; dramatically less than when they'd been in Canaan House, and Harrow hadn't weighed much even back then.

“Freezing? I ought to be _dead_. Look, I still don’t have a clue what’s going on, but I’m starting to suspect that being cold is the last thing I should be worried about right now - even if I was cold, which I’m weirdly not. Do you ever eat, Nonagesimus? No, don’t answer that, I’ve been in your brain and I know you absolutely do not. You might be into skeletons, but I’d like to not have to worry I’m going to break you if I hug you too tight!”

“You… you would want to hold me? If I were less… If I had more…” there was a raw, vulnerable hope in Harrow’s voice that was honestly painful for Gideon to hear, so she cut her off before Harrow could work out where she was going with that sentence.

“Idiot. I love you!" It was surprisingly easy to say, after all this time. If suffering brought knowledge, perhaps tears held freedom. Perhaps she'd suffered, and wept, enough that they would never need to be lost or uncertain again. "I’d hold you if you were a skeleton. I’d like to do _so_ much more than just hold you.” 

Gideon was gratified to notice Harrow blush at this. No wonder she kept the paint sacrament, if her face so readily betrayed her feelings without it. In a heroic act of self-control, Gideon didn’t point out the flush of Harrow’s naked cheeks. “As always, you miss the point spectacularly;” she said instead, “I just want you to take some damn care of yourself. What sort of cavalier does it make me if you die of malnutrition?”

“I’m a lyctor, Nav. Starvation won’t kill me.”

“Way to miss the point _again_. I don’t care if you can’t actually starve all the way to death. I’m aiming for a slightly higher bar than just ‘not dead’. Eat! Maybe one of these days we can go really wild and consider, you know, sleeping. There’s more to life than just surviving.”

“There hasn’t been. Not for me. Not since you died.”

“I know. I saw it, remember? It was bloody awful watching you going through the motions like some sort of bone construct. I didn’t die for that!”

“You shouldn’t have died for me at all”

“I’m a cavalier. That’s what we do. You knew what you were signing up for when you asked me, even if I absolutely didn’t. But look, we can be sad that I died, or we can move the fuck on and be happy I’m not dead anymore. I’m pretty sure I just cried enough for two lifetimes, and I’m ready to get over it”


	15. Harrow

It turned out that some of Harrow’s robes had been left behind when she had gone to Canaan house, and would fit Gideon well enough for now, with some alterations. Though they would have draped in huge, funereal folds over Harrow’s spare frame, the robe she’d proffered was rather briefer on Gideon. 

The fabric pulled a little tight across the chest and hips, and fell only to mid-calf. The sleeves Gideon had torn out entirely, as they were apparently too tight to allow for easy movement. The two sleeves, knotted together, served as a reasonable enough belt, and Gideon had managed to affix the scabbard of the two-hander from the tomb to it. It was not _Gideon’s_ two hander, the one Harrow had spent so many months both caring for and dreading, but Gideon had remarked that having a blade - any blade - on her hip again made her feel a billion times less naked, even though Harrow was still acutely aware that she wore nothing underneath the robe, for it would have taken a miracle to fit her into Harrowhark’s underwear.

Gideon was also still barefoot, which she hadn’t been happy about, but there was nothing to be done about that. While Gideon had fussed with the robe, Harrow had painted her face in brief, practiced strokes, and cropped her hair with equal efficiency. She forebore to mention that Gideon did neither of these things; it didn’t really matter any more, did it? 

Adorned in her familiar vestments, face no longer bare, and hair no longer tickling the nape of her neck, Harrow felt better than she had in months. It was as though the weight of all that had happened at Canaan house, and after, had fallen from her shoulders, and she could finally stand up straight, unbowed by either uncertainty or that damned hateful sword. 

She still felt the vague stab of panic whenever Gideon was out of reach, and contrived to raise a hand to brush her cavalier’s skin whenever Gideon moved past her. Once they were both as decent as could be managed, she took Gideon’s hand, reassured by the contact.

“Nope,” Gideon responded instantly, pulling her hand away.

“What?” Harrow replied, startled by the rejection, and faintly furious at herself for being startled, for and for putting herself in the position to be rejected in the first place. She pulled her spine to rigid erectness and lifted her chin, preparing to wrap herself in remote and chilly indifference before Gideon could see how much she was hurt.

But Gideon simply stepped around to her other side, taking her necromancer’s right hand in her left. 

“Wrong side. You have to hold my left hand - I use my right to draw my sword.”

“But that means walking with that horrid blade between us.”

“It's in a scabbard, you idiot. It’s not going to hurt you.”

“That’s not the point! I don’t like it.”

“You don’t have to like it, but you do have to deal with it. I’m your cavalier, Harrow. We said the words, and you can’t take that back. I can’t be _your_ blade if I don’t have _a_ blade. You don’t catch me complaining about all those bones you wear… although, come to think of it…”

“Not a chance,” Harrow said, and she swept out of her chambers, pulling Gideon behind her, before her cavalier could say anything else. 

The bickering was familiar, comforting, and oddly intimate. Their words settled into well-worn grooves, fit together as neatly as their tightly-gripped hands. Harrow had been so tempted to suggest that they stay in her chambers, aching to find out whether they would join together so perfectly in any other ways… but in the end, she was the Reverend Daughter of a House which was suddenly and inexplicably empty, and duty came first. 

_Though, speaking of duty_ … Harrow reached her free hand into her robes, and pulled out the rolled up paper she’d retrieved from her desk when Gideon wasn’t looking. She handed it over, wordlessly, letting go of her cavalier’s hand to allow her to break the seal and uncoil the document. Gideon scanned the words written there, then stopped, and read them again, more carefully.

“What is this?” Gideon asked, voice low, and dangerously calm.

“It is your freedom. This document dissolves your debt of indenturement, and gives you free passage to anywhere in the empire, with the Ninth House’s full support, and the backing of all her resources. The signature is mine, signed in blood. It is completely legally binding”

“But… you didn’t just write this. I would have seen you.”

“I wrote it years ago. I’ve always known that it was wrong of us to keep you, to pretend like we owned you, but I was too scared to let you go, and so lonely - and then, after my parents… well, I had too many secrets to keep, to allow _anyone_ to leave this House, even you.

“I guess maybe I thought that if you could be forgiven the debt we decided you owed, for the simple fact of existing, then perhaps there was hope for me too, for all that my debt was so much larger.”

“It wasn’t your debt at all, Harrow,” Gideon said. She sounded angry, but not, she thought, at Harrow herself. Maybe that was only wishful thinking; she'd suspected that Gideon wouldn't take this well. “You didn’t kill those children. You didn’t ask to be born. Maybe you got to live, but you’re a victim, the same as they were.”

“That doesn’t excuse what was done to you.”

“No it doesn’t,” Gideon said. “Neither does this,” she waved the paper, “nothing can give either of us back everything that was taken from us. But I told you I forgave you, and I meant it.”

Gideon tucked the papers into the folds of her own robes, and took Harrow’s hand again. Harrow was relieved that she hadn’t tried to refuse the document cementing her freedom. With everything going on, well, it might end up being little more than a symbol at this point, but even as a symbol, it was important. 

Harrow didn’t want Gideon as her chattel. Crux had always hated Gideon for what he saw as a lack of proper deference, of fealty, duty, but Harrow had seen the true depths of Gideon’s fidelity, and they scared her. 

She had never done a thing to earn the sort of cavalier who would fall on a railing for her. Though she held Gideon’s hand in hers, warm and alive, Harrow’s mind flinched away from the memory. Even before that, she had done nothing to deserve a cavalier who would submit unquestioningly to the trials they’d completed in the facility below Canaan House. 

It scared Harrow to think that Gideon would place her mind, her life, her very soul, in Harrow’s hands, for no better reason than because Harrow had asked her to. 

Harrow didn’t want that. She had never wanted Gideon to sacrifice herself for Harrow. Especially not for _just_ Harrow - not Harrow the Reverend Daughter, heir to the Ninth House, Keeper of the Locked Tomb, or Harrowhark The First, Ninth Saint to serve the King Undying - but just her, just Harrow, stripped of all duties and dignities, for she knew that Gideon was not concerned with Harrow's titles, and had little respect for her authority, and her sacrifice had not been for the Ninth, or the Empire, or the King Undying, but for just Harrow.

Gideon had always treated Harrow as just a person, and now Harrow desperately needed Gideon to treat herself the same way, to see that she was inexpressibly, irreplaceably valuable, that she was more than just a sacrificial lamb, fit only to die to serve a larger purpose or achieve a greater end. Gideon was her own purpose, and her own end, and Harrow would not, could not, give her love to someone who didn’t have the capacity to refuse it. 

She’d done what she could. Gideon now had the power to tell Harrow to go to hell, legally at least. The rest would have to come from Gideon herself.


	16. Gideon

So… that was a lot. 

Gideon and Harrow had spent the last several hours catching up with the other survivors of Canaan house, and with Alecto - who hadn’t mentioned their previous conversation, for which Gideon was profoundly grateful. Now they’d all separated, and returned their quarters, ostensibly to sleep, though she wasn’t sure how anyone would sleep tonight, with the sum total of all their collective revelations out in the open. Gideon had been relieved that there'd been no question of her returning to her cell alone - when they'd gotten up, Harrow had instantly taken Gideon's hand, and Gideon had gone with her to the suite set aside for the Reverend Daughter.

Now Harrow sat in front of her mirror, removing her paint. Gideon was interested to see that her necromancer took a lot longer to remove the paint than she did to put it on in the first place, rubbing a handful of oil over her face, until she was smeared uniformly grey, and then wiping the oily mess off with a cloth dipped into astringent-smelling liquid.

No wonder the Reverend Daughter never got pizza face from all that paint!

Gideon had no paint to remove. Nor did she have any nightclothes, so once she’d untied the knotted fabric serving as a belt, and put her sword safely to one side, she had nothing to do but sit and think while she waited to see what Harrow would do next.

Gideon had sort of expected that Harrow would be all over Alecto the second she saw her, but Harrow seemed as poleaxed as the rest of them by the sheer presence of the eldritch horror. Harrow was learning the hard way - again - that you should never meet your gods.

Gideon was incredibly relieved that it looked like she wasn’t going to have to have the ‘are you being safe’ conversation 2.0, where ‘safe’ referred more to body armour than prophylaxis. 

That was the only reason for her relief. Honestly....

 _Fuck it._

Gideon was relieved that Harrow apparently didn’t want to share Alecto’s bed after all, and she knew that it was time for her to admit to herself that it was at least partly because she thought she might want Harrow in her bed instead.

Besides which, Harrow had given Gideon her freedom. The document was still in Gideon’s pocket, feeling like far heavier a weight than a single sheet of paper could possibly be. It hadn’t felt like freedom. It had felt like rejection. Gideon wasn’t sure how she would have reacted if Harrow had given her that, and then left her to be with Alecto.

If Palamedes was right, and Harrow and Gideon had somehow managed to accidentally achieve perfect lyctorhood, despite not having followed any of the steps, then that meant that they were bonded, right? Gideon and Harrow - cav and necro forever?

Why wasn’t that enough to assuage Gideon’s insecurity?

Harrow turned around to look at Gideon, and once again, the sight of her unpainted face, with Gideon’s own yellow eyes staring out at her, was a shock, though not an unpleasant one. 

“If I asked you to go back to your cell, what would you say?” Harrow asked. Gideon stood up to go, ignoring the sinking disappointment in her chest.

“Sit down, Griddle!” Harrow said, sounding exasperated, “it was a hypothetical question. If I asked you to go - what would you say?”

“I’d go. I don’t want to be here if you don’t want me here.”

“And if I asked you to stay?”

“I’d stay.”

Harrow frowned. 

“What if I asked you to take word to Palamedes that I’d like to invite him to share my bed for the night?”

“Ew, you’re into Sextus?”

“Hypothetical again, Griddle. I have no carnal interest in Palamedes.”

“So why’d you say that?”

“I wanted to know what you’d say. Would you have done it, if I’d asked?”

“I guess. Why?”

“And if I asked you to jump off the top tier of Drearburh?”

“I mean, serious dick move if you did, but why not? Not like it’s going to kill me.”

“For goodness’ sake, Griddle! Is there nothing I could ask that you wouldn’t do? Without even questioning why I’d ask?”

Gideon thought about it. “Nope.”

For someone who had spent most of Gideon’s life bemoaning her lack of proper obedience and fidelity to her House, and its Reverend Daughter, said Reverend Daughter really didn’t look as happy as she should have. In fact, she looked downright pissed.

“What’s this about, Harrow? Why all the stupid questions?”

“I wanted to know that I could trust you to refuse me if I asked you for something unreasonable. I don't understand, I haven't understood since Canaan house why you were suddenly so eager to fulfil my every whim. You spent your whole life thwarting me at every turn, but all I have to do is ask nicely and you’ll do anything?”

“Pretty much.”

“Don’t you see how appalling that is?”

“I thought you’d be happy, that I’m trying to be a proper cav, and like, do my duty and stuff.”

“Perhaps a few years ago, I would have been, but not anymore. I don’t want you to die _for_ me, Gideon, I want you to live _with_ me. I want you as a partner, not a subordinate. By all accounts, we have a very long life together to look forward to - “

Gideon couldn’t help but feel a profound relief when Harrow said ‘together’.

“- and I refuse to spend the next myriad taking responsibility for every stupid thing you do.”

“Hey!”

“I need to know that I can trust you to say no when you need to. If I can’t, then your yeses are meaningless, and oh...” Harrow’s voice was suddenly deep and low and husky in a way that Gideon was completely unfamiliar with, and which seemed to speak directly to her cunt. “Oh, there are so many things I want you to say yes to…”

“Yes,” Gideon said, automatically - instantly and wholeheartedly, mesmerised by the naked hunger in Harrow’s newly-yellow eyes, a hunger which was then replaced with a deep, weary, sadness as soon as Gideon spoke.

“You miss the point entirely, Nav.”

“Well you’re not making any sense,” Gideon was tired, and getting increasingly frustrated. “I want you, you said you want me. Why have you got to make things complicated?”

“I’m not trying to make things complicated. Things _are_ complicated, and they always have been. The Ninth House made you a bondswoman, and I am the Reverend Daughter. That’s complicated. My parents tried to kill you when they were making me. That’s complicated. You died to make me a lyctor, and shared my brain for months. That’s complicated. There’s nothing about us that isn’t complicated, and I can’t make it simple, but I can try to make it right.”

“How?”

“A lot of hard work. We need to learn to trust each other, and talk to each other. You need to learn that you have choices, and I need to learn to respect that. We’ve got a long road ahead of us…” Harrow’s voice cracked, “and I can’t stand it.”


	17. Harrow

“I can’t stand how far we still are from each other.” Harrow admitted in a defeated tone.

Harrow knew what she had to do. She knew, that as the person who had always held the power between them, it was her absolute duty to ask nothing of Gideon until the scales had been balanced. She knew that she should ask Gideon to leave, and sleep alone tonight, and that to do anything less would be an abuse of her position.

And the thought of Gideon leaving, of being even that far away from her cavalier, was something Harrow couldn’t bear. She should have hated herself for being so weak, but she’d become too used to weakness over these past months to feel the sting of it anymore.

There had to be some solution. A way to get the reassurance and closeness she craved, without compromising her principles.

Inspiration struck, and Harrow fell to her knees before Gideon.

“I will put the work in,” she said, “I swear that to you. Until then, I am yours to command.”

Gideon laughed. It was a profoundly uncomfortable sound, and Harrow saw the blood rush to her cheeks.

“You can’t be serious.”

“I am completely serious.” Harrow met Gideon’s eyes, and did not look away. 

“But all that nonsense you were saying about power and choices and stuff. How is it any better if _I’m_ telling _you_ what to do?”

“Because the power has always been mine. The only thing you ever forced me to do was to use your death to become a lyctor, and even then I found a loophole. You may be assured that I will not agree to anything I don’t want, but you might be surprised at how little there is that I do not want from you.” 

Harrow smiled, knowing that it was a wobbly, uncertain smile, one which utterly betrayed her vulnerability, but she didn’t care. 

“So… if I told you to kiss me…?”

“I would kiss you.”

“And if I told you to backflip off Drearburh?”

“I would politely decline. Though, I might ask why you wanted it. If you feel that I need to suffer, as recompense for everything I put you through…”

“No! I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a relief.”

“You _did_ say that you’d do it though, if I was alive, and I am alive.”

“I was speaking hyperbolically. You can trust that my joy is not the slightest bit diminished by my reluctance to break my neck.”

“Okay, look, this is too weird. Can you just stand up?”

Harrow stood. 

She still had to look up to carry on holding Gideon’s gaze, but she didn’t resent it, the way she’d bitterly resented having to look up at Ianthe. Having Gideon towering over her made her feel safe.

“I want to…” Gideon’s blush was fierce, “can I kiss you?”

“Yes.” Harrow breathed, and Gideon leaned down to kiss her. For all that her cavalier was flushed, Gideon’s skin didn’t feel any hotter than her own - Harrow realised that she must be blushing too, and that the blush would be all the more obvious on her slightly paler skin. She decided not to care, and focused only on the feeling of her cavalier’s lips against hers.

Harrow allowed Gideon to take the lead, but she was not passive. With each movement of her lips, each desperate breath, she tried to convey devotion, adoration, need. Her hands she clenched into fists, against the desire to touch her cavalier, unbidden.

“I liked it, earlier,” Gideon breathed through their joined lips, “when you were rougher with me.”

Harrow’s knees went weak; if it hadn’t been for the fact that every fibre of her being yearned towards her cavalier, she would have fallen back to the floor.

“Tell me what to do,” Harrow said in response, not bothering to try and mask the catch in her voice.

“Bite me?”

Harrow almost pushed for specifics, but Gideon’s voice was so raw that she took pity, and caught Gideon’s lower lip between her own sharp teeth, applying just the barest amount of pressure.

“More,” the word was distorted, with Gideon’s lip still trapped between Harrow’s teeth, but not so distorted that her meaning was unclear. Harrow bit down, harder, then harder, until Gideon groaned in apparent pleasure.

Harrow couldn’t have said how long they kissed, the sweetness interspersed with sharp moans every time Harrow used her teeth. At one point, she broke skin, and there was a brief rush of blood between them, but Gideon healed almost instantly. 

Some tightly-coiled fear unwound in Harrow, then. It was one thing to see their changed eyes, to know that Gideon’s mortal wound had disappeared as though it had never happened, and another to witness her healing in real time. 

“I want to touch you,” Gideon said, eventually, and Harrow took the opportunity to catch her breath.

“Where?”

“ _Everywhere_.” 

Harrow wanted to say yes. Oh how she wanted to say yes, but there was still the part of her which had ducked Ianthe’s kisses, and been horrified at the sight of God under the hands of his lyctors. The part of her which never let her stand undressed before a mirror, and flinched away from the covers of Gideon's awful magazines. 

She didn’t love her body. She didn’t hate it. She’d never thought about it much at all really, but it was hard to feel like her flesh could be a vessel for desire when she herself found nothing desirable in it. 

“Not yet,” she said, regretfully, but determined to be as honest with Gideon as she wanted Gideon to be with her. “I’m not ready for that.”

“What, then?”

“Ask me for something more specific.”

“Can I… touch your hair? In the magazines they’re always running their hands through each others’ hair, so it must be good.”

“Yes.” Harrow was less confident in Gideon’s magazines, Especially when Harrow did not have flowing locks like the girls in the pictures, but there was nothing in this to make her uncomfortable, so no reason to refuse.

Hesitantly at first, then with more confidence, but still gentle, Gideon reached up to run her hands over the velvet of Harrow’s freshly-shorn scalp. 

“It’s soft,” Gideon said, sounding surprised. Harrow barely heard her. No one had ever touched her like this. No one had run their hands through her hair. Even when she’d been a child, too young to shear her own locks, she had only known the blade of the razor; no one had ever touched her more than absolutely necessary.

She felt her eyes rolling back into her head, her eyelids drifting inexorably shut, cutting off her vision in an attempt to keep her mind from being washed away by the sensory flood. Gideon’s hand at the nape of her neck was magnified a thousand times, the follicle of each disturbed strand of hair its own frisson of pleasure. She hadn’t known that so mundane a touch could feel like this.

She wondered for a moment how anyone survived the intimacy of intercourse if something this simple could be so devastatingly, overwhelmingly wonderful. 

“Harrow?”

Harrow dragged her attention back into focus, and realised that Gideon had her other hand at the small of Harrow’s back, pressing their bodies together, and supporting the bulk of Harrow’s weight, for her legs had apparently abdicated their duty.

“I apologise,” Harrow said, fighting to persuade her body to come back under her control.

“Don’t,” Gideon replied, sounding as breathless as Harrow felt. “That was incredible. Should we, uh, you should lie down, I guess?”

Harrow’s heart beat faster with a curious admixture of excitement and fear. 

Gideon must have sensed her hesitation. “Just so you don’t fall. That’s all. Nothing… uh… you know.”

Harrow did know, and she was grateful for the clarification. Her robe was draped over the back of her chair, and she spared a moment to miss it, but she was perfectly decently covered by her shirt and trousers, even if they clung more closely, revealing more of the lines of her body than she generally preferred to display. 

She sat on the edge of the bed, feeling awkward and unsure. She didn’t know what to do with her arms. Gideon was even taller from this angle, the juxtaposition of their bodies even more stark. Harrow felt small, and more fragile than a lyctor could strictly be considered to be.

“On your front,” Gideon said, seeing her hesitate. Harrow was surprised, but not unwilling. She lay on her front, head pillowed on her arms, and it was an incredible relief to hide her face in the blankets, until she breathed the familiar, musty, Ninth House smell of them, and she could see nothing at all. 

She waited for Gideon to say something, waited for the bed to sag under her cavalier’s weight, but there was nothing. The stab of panic, at not knowing if Gideon was still there, was becoming almost expected. She opened her eyes, looked around, and Gideon hadn’t moved. 

Instantly, Harrow realised the the problem. The Ninth House was a house of penitents and nuns. Its population had not been self-sustaining, even at its height, and it had always made up numbers with the steady influx of pilgrims from other houses. Even in the Reverend Daughter’s cell, the austere furnishings reflected her House’s nature - her bed was little more than a cot, and not wide enough to accommodate more than one body. Certainly not large enough to encourage anything… procreative. 

Her parents’ suite had a double bed, of course, but the thought of lying in the bed where she’d been conceived, while down in the creche two hundred children had choked and died, where Gideon had choked and lived... 

“Can I…?” Gideon approached the bed, snapping Harrow out of her thoughts. Gideon swung one knee onto the thin strip of bed at Harrow’s side until she was half kneeling, level with Harrow’s hips. She gestured vaguely, until Harrow caught her meaning, and nodded agreement. Gideon lifted her other knee, and pivoted, and then she was kneeling with one leg on each side of Harrow’s hips.

She knew that Gideon wasn’t resting her entire weight on her hips - but the feeling of Gideon kneeling over her was indescribable. Harrow hid her face again in the blankets, half-smothering her unexpectedly contented sigh, and then Gideon’s weight shifted forwards, and her hands were running through the short fuzz of Harrow’s hair again, and it would have taken more than blankets to contain Harrow’s inarticulate gasps of pleasure.

Gideon’s hands paused at the base of Harrow’s skull, in unspoken query, and Harrow recovered enough of her senses to breathe _yes,_ before she was lost again in the sensation of Gideon’s hands tracing her neck, and spine, an unconscious mimicry of the path Harrow’s own hands had followed down Gideon’s spine, just a few hours earlier.

Gideon splayed her hands, thumbs together on Harrow’s spine, and her smallest fingers easily reaching the sharp blades of Harrow’s scapulae. Harrow could feel the warmth of her fingers through the cloth of her shirt, and found herself wishing that no fabric came between them, that she could feel Gideon’s bare skin against her own.

Finally, Gideon came to rest with the heels of her hands occupying the slight dip on either side of Harrow’s spine, where her sacrum joined the sweep of the iliac crests. Harrow’s shirt had ridden up slightly, and she felt cold air across a thin strip of naked skin, but Gideon had stopped short of touching it. 

“Yes,” Harrow said, and when Gideon didn’t move, “ _Yes,_ ” again. Harrow’s entire being had dwindled to her hips between Gideon’s thighs, Gideon’s hands on her back, and that single word. She was glorious assent made flesh, and with each beat of her heart, the blood rushed through her ears, hissing _yes._ She was limp with compliance, acquiescence, readiness. 

For all that she’d said otherwise earlier, Harrow was beyond refusal. The concept of _no_ was nonsensical to her now. It wasn’t that she couldn’t have said no, but that it was impossible to want to; Gideon could ask anything of her, and she wouldn’t just agree, her whole being would joyfully submit to the least of Gideon’s whims. She wanted… she just _wanted._

“Talk to me,” Gideon said, and Harrow felt a tiny flutter of resentment, like a tugging on her solar plexus. She didn’t want to talk; she wanted to dissolve into the sensation of hands on her skin, and weight pressing her into the thin mattress. 

“Say something.” Gideon said, and Harrow said _yes._ Or, she was pretty sure she said it. Her mind had retreated to the very base of her brainstem, where there was no responsibility, no complexity, no regrets for yesterday, and no fears for tomorrow. There was only now, and there was only this. 

“You’ve made your point, okay?.” If Harrow had cared to to put a word to Gideon’s tone, it would have been frustrated, but the only frustration Harrow knew lived in the skin which Gideon was not touching, the lips which Gideon was not kissing…

“I get it,” Gideon tried again. Harrow didn’t get ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ was, but she didn’t really care. _It_ wasn’t important; it couldn’t be. Only this mattered.

“Stop!” Gideon said finally, and that got through - would have, even if it hadn’t been accompanied by the hands lifting from her back, leaving her cold where they’d been. Gideon climbed off her, stood beside the bed, and Harrow was bereft. 

A moment more, thoughts rushing into the space left behind when Gideon had stopped touching her, and Harrow was ashamed. She had lost control, had once again betrayed what small and hard-won trust Gideon had in her.

It was selfish, venal, unforgivable, to allow herself to retreat into the oblivion of sensation, to forget herself in this way, and she knew that she didn’t deserve that respite. She had no right to escape herself that way; she was an abomination, and any minute she didn’t suffer for her monstrousness was a minute when her two hundred souls burned with the agony of the forgotten and the unavenged. Harrow’s penance has always been twofold; it was not enough simply to achieve sufficient greatness to justify their loss, she must also always remember what she was, and never mistake herself for a person.

But now, betrayal on top of betrayal. She had broken her vow to Gideon, and used her as an escape, had left her alone again, as alone as when she’d been shut in Harrow’s mind, unable to be heard, unable to get through. Without lifting her face from its concealing nest of blankets, Harrow curled her body into a tight ball, wrapping her arms around her knees, as if she could compress herself down so small she ceased to exist.


	18. Gideon

Gideon’s heart was pounding. She didn’t understand what had happened, or why Harrow was curled in on herself, refusing to speak or look Gideon in the face, but the creeping sense of shame told her that she’d messed up, somehow. 

Everything had been good - everything had been great - and then, it was like Harrow wasn’t even there any more. Harrow didn’t just lie back and take _anything_ , even if it was something good. Gideon had been waiting for Harrow to heckle her, honestly. She wasn’t sure what to do with a Harrow who didn’t make everything just so goddamn difficult. 

And then she’d figured out that it was some twisty Nonagesimus reverse psychology bullshit, and - if she was being fair - it had been kind of effective. Gideon did understand now that having someone who would do absolutely anything - no questions asked - was not actually as cool as it sounded. But then she’d called Harrow on her bullshit, and instead of getting all cross and defensive like Harrow usually did when Gideon caught her scheming, she was just… hiding. Which was not like her at _all._

“Harrow?” Gideon asked, but there was no response.

“Did I do something wrong?” 

Nothing

“Do you want me to go?”

Nothing

Gideon lost her temper.

“For fuck’s sake, Nonagesimus. You do not get to pull that shit and then not talk to me. You said I could trust you. You said you’d say something if it wasn’t okay, but you didn’t say anything at all, and everything clearly _isn’t_ okay, so just talk to me, damnit.”

Nothing

“Fine.”

Gideon grabbed her sword and walked out. She toyed briefly with the thought of tracking down Coronabeth and seeing she wanted to spar, or, you know, _spar,_ but it was no good. She wanted Harrow, and no one else, no matter how gorgeous, would do.

She went back to her familiar cell, and - knowing she wouldn’t sleep if she tried - she started working her way through the old routine. Press-ups, crunches, the whole lot. Dying didn’t seem to have affected her strength, or her stamina, which was a relief, but being indestructible was no excuse to let herself go, and it was nice to have a simple, easy justification for her pounding heart and sweaty skin, and the sick adrenaline still coursing through her.

A short while later, there was a polite knocking. Feeling utterly fed up, Gideon shouted in response, but made no move to get up and open the door. She was not in the mood for the Sixth House and their weird fixation with her bodily functions.

“If you ask me about my piss one more time I am going to punch something.”

“Let me in, Griddle.” 

So, it was Harrow outside her door, which was something of a surprise. Gideon didn’t think Harrow even knew _how_ to knock.

“Go away.”

“You wanted to talk.”

“Yeah, and you didn’t. Now _I_ don’t want to talk. Go away.”

“Don’t be juvenile, Griddle.”

“Why the fuck not? If you’re just going to play games with me, then why should I be the mature one?”

“I wasn’t playing games…” 

Gideon cut her off.

“The hell you weren’t. _Oh, Gideon, I’m just too amazing, you couldn’t possibly ever say no to me, Saint fucking Harrow._ What a hypocrite. Hi Pot, I’m Kettle.”

“I made a mistake.”

“Oh, you’re actually admitting to making a mistake now? Hang on, let’s hold a goddamn parade. It’s too little, too late, Harrow. Go away.”

“I underestimated my capacity for physiological… look, are you really going to make me stand in the hallway and shout?”

“Why shouldn’t I? We both know you’ll stick a bone through the door and unlock it if you really want to come in.”

“No I won’t.”

“ _Bullshit._ ”

“I won’t! I meant it, about respecting your choices.”

“Yeah, I feel real respected right now.”

“Will you just let me explain?”

“Go right ahead.”

A frustrated sigh.

“Will you let me _come in_ and explain?”

“Nope.”

“Very well.” Harrow took a deep breath; Gideon heard her through the door. Harrow didn’t really have to shout to be heard, since the Ninth house wasn’t much for privacy, and Gideon’s door was barely robust enough to block out the dim light of the hallway, but Harrow raised her voice anyway.

“I admit that I underestimated my… susceptibility to your proximity. I had thought myself beyond being overcome by something so simple as common… lust…”

Gideon leapt to her feet and opened the door before Harrow could say anything else. It was just too awful to picture Harrow standing in the hallway where anyone could hear her, shouting words like ‘lust’ in her most uptight, prissy, holier-than-thou voice - the one she only pulled out when she was feeling _really_ uncomfortable.

Even more awful when she opened the door and found that Harrow was not wearing her robes, and had not painted her face. She was still wearing her shirt and trousers, as she had been when Gideon left her, but for Harrow, that was basically naked.

“Get in here, idiot.” Gideon said, grabbing Harrow’s hand and pulling her through the door, closing it behind her. At least they had the illusion of privacy now, even if it was basically only an illusion, if any of the others were nearby.

Harrow stood awkwardly in the corner. Gideon was amazed that she managed to look tiny in the cramped space of Gideon’s cell, when she could easily fill Drearburh’s huge cathedral with her presence.

Gideon sat on her cot, then took pity on Harrow, and shuffled to the side, gesturing for her necromancer to sit next to her. They ended up cross-legged and facing each other, knees just touching. 

“What happened back there?” Gideon asked. Seeing Harrow look genuinely lost and out of her depth had cooled the heat of her anger to a manageable irritation. 

“You’ve lived in my brain. You know what it’s like in here, and it _never_ stops. I feel like I have all the sons and daughters of our House in the back of my mind, all the time, demanding that I do more, do better, do _something_ to make their sacrifice worthwhile. I can’t rest.”

“Your brain _is_ a goddamned mess; you’re not wrong. Is that why you basically don’t sleep?”

“More or less. Lying alone in the dark, with nothing to distract me… it’s unbearable. But when you touch me, that all goes away. Before, on the bed? It was _quiet_ ; I’ve literally never felt anything like it. It was like I was living in my body, not my brain, and it was so peaceful there. I didn’t want to come back.”

“Okay, I guess I understand that. I was pretty happy to get out of your brain too. But that wasn’t the deal, Harrow! If I just wanted a body to play with, I’d get one of those dolls they make in the Fourth House -” Gideon had considered it, over the years, but it was way easier to get magazines shipped to her unnoticed than something corpse-sized, so she’d regretfully given up on the notion. “- I don’t want a doll. I want you.”

“I want you too.”

“So how do we do this? Sure, down the road, I’m happy to cuddle you until your brain shuts the fuck up, or whatever, but our first time? Nah. Either we do this together, or we don’t do it at all.”

“Well, my execution may have been somewhat flawed,”

“You can say that again,”

“But I do think there’s merit to the idea of ensuring a certain level of ongoing explicit communication, regarding our intentions.”

“Which in real-person words means?”

“Uh…” Harrow blushed. “I guess it means, we should, uh... talk dirty?”

Now, that was a concept Gideon could get behind.


	19. Harrow

“We should go back to my rooms,” Harrow said, upon realising that Gideon’s cot was even more spartan than her own. She wasn’t sure it was actually large enough for Gideon to comfortably sleep on alone. It certainly wouldn’t accommodate company - even company with a necromancer’s build. “My bed is tiny, but at least I’ve got more floor space. We could throw some blankets down, or something?”

“Works for me.” Gideon grabbed her own blanket, and together they headed for Harrow’s quarters. Harrow couldn’t help but remember creeping through the empty halls of Canaan house, dripping with chlorine and confessions, all those long months ago. This felt similar, as though their budding relationship was a fragile bubble, which could be popped with so much as an outside look, but as they had in Canaan house, they made it to their destination unobserved.

When they were inside, with the doors closed, and they’d piled every spare scrap of fabric into a messy, makeshift bed on the floor, Harrow took a deep breath, braced herself, and undressed.

When she forced herself to meet Gideon’s eyes, they were wide with what Harrow hoped was appreciation, or at least surprise, rather than revulsion. The silence grew quickly uncomfortable, so Harrow broke it.

“Fair’s fair. You were naked, earlier, in the tomb.” When Gideon didn’t instantly respond, Harrow grew unbearably self-conscious. “Should I not have…” Her hands fluttered in a vague attempt to cover herself; Gideon caught them in hers.

“No! You surprised me, is all. It wasn’t a bad surprise. Besides - it isn’t like I’ve never seen you without your clothes on before.” At Harrow’s look of confusion, Gideon continued, “after the siphoning challenge.”

“You were half-dead!”

“More than half, I reckon, but apparently even being all the way dead won’t stop me appreciating the sight of _you_ naked, hot stuff.”

Harrow decided that if blushing without paint was bad, blushing while naked was infinitely worse - Gideon could see _exactly_ how far the flush extended.

“I was hardly at my best…”

“You want a do-over? Okay… first impressions, take two…” Gideon took a step back, and walked around Harrow, looking at her from all angles, while Harrow stood rooted to the spot, trying - and failing - to appear unflustered by the attention.

“So,” Gideon said, with laughter in her voice, “you absolutely did not lift weights like I told you to, and you also never eat, so you lose a point for general lack of muscle tone, but I give you a solid 9/10. And the ass is surprisingly good. Who knew that keeping a stick up your butt all the time qualified as a workout?”

“Griddle!” Harrow exclaimed, scandalised, and suddenly acutely aware of her backside. She was somewhat reassured though - she knew that she didn’t exactly resemble the voluptuous beauties in Gideon’s filthy magazines, and hadn’t been certain that Gideon would actually find her desirable in the first place.

Gideon stripped off her own clothes, with far less hesitance than Harrow had, but then, Harrow knew that Gideon had nothing to be insecure about, physically speaking. If Harrow’s body could serve as an anatomical study in bones, Gideon was pure, sculpted muscle. For all that Harrow didn’t care for flesh as a concept, she could certainly appreciate _this_ flesh.

Emboldened by Gideon’s unselfconscious examination of her own naked self, Harrow took a moment to return the favour, admiring how Gideon’s body was so incredibly muscular, yet still utterly inviting. For all that Gideon had been half-starved on Ninth rations her whole life, her body had none of the hungry tightness of the Saint of Duty - the only other well-muscled body Harrow was even remotely familiar with.

Gideon was beautiful, yes, but Harrow didn’t set much stock in beauty. Ianthe was beautiful too, but like a gorgeous vase - nice to look at, if you could spare the space, but you probably wouldn’t notice for a while if she disappeared. Ianthe was _just_ beautiful. Gideon was also _handsome,_ as in, someone Harrow wanted to get her hands on, strange as it was to admit that to herself.

Gideon’s body was like a whole unexplored realm; as a bone magician, Harrow had never had either the opportunity or the inclination to truly study a bicep, or appreciate a pectoral. She had no frame of reference for how it would feel to run her fingers over Gideon’s obliques or abdominals. She knew the intricate details of the spine more closely than she knew her own mind, but even the erector spinae muscles supporting it were a foreign country to her. 

“Well?” Gideon asked, apparently growing impatient with Harrow’s inspection. 

“Adequate,” Harrow allowed, with a sly grin at Gideon’s instant scowl.

“Are you kidding me?” Gideon asked in playful affront.

“Oh come on, Griddle. You make no secret of how attractive you believe yourself to be; anyone who has ever seen you walk past a mirror knows that you adore yourself. We both know there is no compliment I could give you on your body that you haven’t already given yourself a hundred times over. ”

“Maybe I just want to hear you say them.”

“Then you have only to ask, and I will drown you in adjectives. How about we make it interesting, and run them alphabetically?”

“That sounds like it’s more about how smart you are than how gorgeous I am, but go on. I’ll bite.”

“Oh, I certainly hope so.” Harrow shot back. She attempted a wink, and regretted it instantly, feeling ridiculous, but Gideon seemed to appreciate the effort. 

“Let’s see…”


	20. Harrow

Gideon sat in Harrow’s chair, leaning back, hands clasped behind her head, legs outstretched and crossed at the ankle, the very picture of ease and confidence. Harrow couldn’t help but notice that the pose also admirably displayed Gideon’s triceps, and a number of other muscles which might otherwise have been overlooked, something she suspected was a deliberate, strategic move on Gideon’s part.

And Harrow had to admit that, if it was, the strategy was working.

“You are… alluring.” Harrow said.

“Yep!”

“Attractive”

“Hell yeah.”

“Beautiful”

“Now you’re not even trying.”

“Just because it’s obvious, doesn’t mean it’s inaccurate. You _are_ beautiful.”

“Fine, I’ll give you that.”

“Bewitching”

“ _You’re_ the witch.” Gideon smirked.

“Necromancer, not witch, and that’s as may be, but you’ve still bewitched me.”

Gideon wiggled her fingers in some sort of approximation of necromantic effort, which was so utterly ridiculous that Harrow couldn’t help but laugh.

“Hey! Less laughter, more compliments!”

“Breathtaking.”

“You’re a lyctor. You don’t need to breathe.”

“You made me a lyctor. Q.E.D.”

“Q what?” Gideon stared at Harrow in confusion.

“Quod erat demonstrandum.”

“Was that supposed to mean something?”

“Apparently not.”

“Hey! That didn’t sound much like you telling me how awesome I am. You skipped awesome, by the way.”

“ _However_ shall you forgive me?” Harrow rolled her eyes. “And it was a deliberate omission. I do not say _awesome._ ”

“More. Nice. Stuff.” Gideon demanded, clapping her hands to punctuate the words, eyes dancing with merriment.

“Captivating?”

“Uh… who held who captive in their brain for months?”

“Who held _whom_ captive, I think you mean. And it achieved the desired effect.”

“Yeah, through no fault of _your_ own.”

“Still, I stand by my actions. Moving on.”

“Yes?”

Harrow wracked her brains, cursing whatever passing whim had made her suggest such a ridiculous endeavour.

“Comely…” Harrow saw Gideon drawing a delighted breath, a familiar _‘I’ve just thought of the most terrible joke and yes I am absolutely going to ruin your day with it’_ expression on her face, and hurriedly cut her off. “No. Withdrawn. I do _not_ want to hear it, whatever it is.”

“Aw, but Harrow…”

“Compliments, or puns?”

“You drive a hard bargain, Nonagesimus. Compliments. But you’re finding this way too easy. I’m going to make it _interesting._ ”

Gideon stood up, and circled Harrow, stopping behind her, as Harrow began contemplating the letter ‘D’. Delightful? No…

“Delectable.” 

Gideon kissed her neck, and Harrow gasped, tilting her head to the side to allow her cavalier easier access to the sensitive skin over her carotid artery. Harrow’s eyes fluttered closed, and she reached blindly behind herself, hand finding Gideon’s hip, and holding on to keep from falling.

Then, just as abruptly, Gideon stopped. Harrow couldn’t help the small noise of protest which escaped her.

“More words; more kisses. That’s the deal.” Gideon said. 

Harrow struggled to remember the alphabet. Where had she been? The touch of Gideon’s lips had banished all coherent thought from her brain.

Desirable," she breathed.

"Am I?" Gideon's lips brushed over Harrow's skin as she spoke, and her breath was hot. Again, Gideon kissed her neck, and Harrow fought to keep her knees from buckling. "You really want me?" and now Gideon's voice was soft; the slightest hint of insecurity breaking through.

“More than you could possibly know," Harrow admitted, and then, in a rush of uncomfortable honesty, "more than I can even understand. Every time I think I've managed to comprehend my wanting it grows, exponentially. I didn't think I could contain this much need. I'm still not sure I can."

"Thank you," Gideon replied. "Even after... I still wasn't sure."

"I will spend the rest of my life proving it to you."

"Harrow, we're going to live forever."

"Then I guess I'll have to get very creative with my demonstrations, so you don't get bored... but for now..."

"Yes?"

"You are... enchanting,” Harrow said, smiling.

“That’s basically just 'bewitching' again, but I’m feeling generous,” Gideon said, and Harrow could hear that she was smiling too, her uncertainty back under wraps. It was too much to hope that it had been assuaged entirely - they'd done too much damage to each other over the years to be fixed so easily, but they had time. They had forever. 

Gideon stepped forward until they were touching along the full length of their bodies, and Harrow could lean her head back to rest it in the hollow at the base of her cavalier's throat. Gideon wrapped her arms around Harrow, hands coming to rest low on her belly, just inside the twin curve of her hips. Harrow didn’t know whether she wanted to press herself into those hands, or arch her back, and lean further into the enticing heat behind her…

“Enticing,” she blurted, and was rewarded with a kiss on the crown of her head. One of Gideon’s hands moved over her skin, caressing a line up from her hip and coming to rest beneath Harrow’s left breast, cupping its scant weight.

“Exquisite.”

The pad of Gideon’s thumb brushed over and around Harrow’s nipple, coaxing it into near-painful rigidity, until Harrow wanted to scream from mingled pleasure and frustration, simultaneously needing more, and never wanting it to stop. 

Then the thumb stilled, stubbornly refusing to provide further stimulation, no matter how Harrow tried to twist and shift herself into greater contact.

“More,” Gideon growled low in her throat, and Harrow wrenched her attention back, cursing once more this corner she’d talked herself into. 

“Fetching,” Harrow dredged up from who-knows-where, and " _gorgeous_ ". Gideon pulled away, but only for a second, adjusting her position so that she could kiss Harrow’s neck again. She stroked Harrow’s nipple more urgently now, and Harrow could feel her awareness darting back and forth between the hand on her breast, and the other on her hip, the lips on her neck, and Gideon’s thighs against her buttocks, riding the wave of sensation, always just one step ahead of being utterly overcome.

The kiss stopped, the hands stilled, and this time Harrow took a moment to compose herself. Her next word was easily chosen, and required no thought, so her overtaxed brain could rest for now. When the lack of sensation was once again more torture than reprieve, Harrow smiled, and said “ _handsome_.”

Gideon’s knee gently insinuated itself between Harrow’s legs, until she had to shift her feet apart slightly to keep her balance. The touch of cool air made her suddenly aware of her hot, swollen labia and the slick wetness on her thighs, both biological phenomena which had, until now, been largely theoretical to her.

She was not surprised to find that arousal was messy, and uncomfortable - wasn’t the same true of most of the things her flesh did, from eating to weeping? She had _not_ been prepared for how insistent it was; a clamouring, unrelenting demand for attention.

Thankfully, it was attention Gideon seemed more than willing to provide. Gideon’s thigh was still between her legs, and by arching her back, Harrow could grind her sensitive folds against it, though Gideon’s skin was too soft, too smooth, to provide the friction Harrow found herself craving.

She should have been appalled at the vulgar, staccato motions of her pelvis, the desperate, animal whimpers escaping her parted lips, but she was too far gone for shame, and it was at least a little consolation that Gideon herself was not unaffected; she was making some movements and sounds of her own.

Harrow could not conceive of the strength of will it must have taken for Gideon to pull away from her at that point, but her cavalier had always been stubborn. In desperation, she tried “lovely,” but it was uninspired, and she knew it. 

Still, it was a shock when Gideon sank teeth into Harrow’s neck, just hard enough to be painful, but it was a blazing, thrilling pain which did nothing to dull Harrow’s arousal. 

“You skipped ‘hot’,” Gideon said, and Harrow vowed to do penitence on her knees for this heresy, realising a moment too late that she’d said this out loud.

“Oh, my umbral sovereign,” Gideon sighed rapturously, “we’ve all the time in the world for that… but you aren’t even halfway through the alphabet, and you can’t talk if you’re on your knees with your face in my cunt.”

Harrow was mortified in the truest sense; she felt as though her flesh were being ritually flayed from her bones for what her words had accidentally implied. _She hadn’t meant… She wasn’t suggesting…_

Though, the thought wasn’t _entirely_ without appeal, if she could get past the faintly nauseating prospect of the various fluids involved. 

She twisted around in Gideon’s arms so that she could hide her face in her cavalier’s chest. Before she’d really considered the implications of this, given that they were both - in fact - naked, her head was tucked between Gideon’s breasts. Gideon’s skin was hot, flushed, damp with sweat, and Harrow could _smell_ her. In trying to shield herself from the thought of fluids, she had in fact confronted herself with their reality. Her cavalier’s sweat had an indescribable _Gideon_ smell that Harrow had never consciously noticed before, but which was instantly familiar. 

For all its familiarity, the aroma carried new notes, that Harrow knew she hadn’t smelled on Gideon before. She knew the scent of Gideon sweaty from exertion, she knew the sour tang of sickness, the acrid bite of fear-sweat. This was none of those; this was Gideon excited, aroused, wanton, or, as Gideon herself would probably have put it, horny as balls.

The thought should have bothered Harrow, in all her uptight fastidiousness. She should be scrubbing herself with steel wool and boiling lye at the knowledge that she was slick with Gideon’s sweat, and even worse, her own traitorous fluids, but she found that she couldn’t care. 

She’d had Gideon’s blood on her hands, touched her shattered sternum, the ruptured sack of her stilled heart, her flaccid, deflated lungs. They’d shared an intimacy that Harrow would have given anything to undo. What was sweat? What horrors could Gideon’s living body hold after Harrow had felt its death?

And, in more practical terms, she briskly reminded herself, anyone who’d spent the better part of a month compulsively upchucking until she’d had nothing more to vomit than her own organs - and she’d had a bloody good go at that - should long since have passed the threshold of being disturbed by her own bodily fluids.

Her squeamishness thoroughly banished, for the time being at least, Harrow was free to realise the other opportunities which were, quite literally, nudging her in the face. Slowly, giving Gideon the time to stop her - though she showed no signs of wanting to object - Harrow turned her head and took one of Gideon’s nipples in her mouth. 

She was gratified by Gideon’s gasp, the way Gideon’s arms tightened reflexively around her. The point of Gideon’s nipple was cooler than she’d expected, and surprisingly firm, when compared to the soft skin of the rest of the breast. Remembering the motions of Gideons thumb which had worked her into such a frenzy only moments ago, Harrow tried to mimic them with her tongue. Gideon moaned, and leaned into the contact until Harrow’s face was crushed into her breast in a way which could have been a problem if Harrow still needed to breathe. 

There was so little of Gideon’s body which was yielding, that Harrow found herself fascinated by the softness of her breasts, raising a hand to cradle the one she didn’t currently have her face buried in. She had neither the expertise, nor the spare attention to try anything skillful, so she just allowed herself to enjoy the sensation of the soft weight in her hand. Gideon’s unformed vocalisations took on a distinctly pleading note, and so Harrow gripped tighter, gradually clenching her hand until it was almost fisted in the defenceless flesh, something Harrow was sure must have been painful, but Gideon apparently enjoyed. 

At this discovery, Harrow grew more experimental with the nipple in her mouth, trying a graze of teeth, a gentle nip, and she was almost crushed by the vehemence of Gideon’s response. She dared an upwards glance, when she could move her head enough, to ensure that Gideon was still okay - her responses were emphatic, but not unambiguous - and their eyes met.

“God, Harrow… you are so fucking _beautiful_ …”

Harrow ducked her head instantly and pulled away, an automatic denial of Gideon’s words. She wasn’t beautiful; she had accepted that it was basically only scarcity of other options which brought Gideon to her bed, and could only hope that their lifelong entanglement and the bonds they'd forged of so much shared trauma would keep her there. She was still dreading the moment that Gideon remembered that Coronabeth was here. It was enough to be acceptable, enough to know she wasn’t actively repulsive. But Gideon never lied to her, and she couldn’t bear for her to start now.

“You don’t have to say that.” Harrow croaked, voice distorted by the lump in her throat.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“I don’t want you to lie to me.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Then something went wrong when we swapped eyes, and the ones you have now are not functional. There’s nothing beautiful about me.”

“Don’t be stupid, Harrow.”

“I’m not being stupid, I’m being realistic. I was not created to inspire lust; I was created for one purpose, to guard the Locked Tomb. My physical body need only be adequate, which is fortunate for me, because that is the _most_ that could be said of it.”

“Did you not hear me just now? I said you were a 9/10, and to be honest, I may have been rounding down because I still haven’t forgiven you for not lifting weights like I told you to.”

“I know you think you’re being kind," Harrow said, wretchedly, "but lying is no kindness to me. That you’re willing to be with me is more than enough.”

“Shut up,” Gideon said, and she effectively assured Harrow’s obedience to this order by kissing her. Harrow hoped that this meant the argument was settled, but then Gideon lifted her off her feet, and turned her around until she once again had her back to Gideon’s chest. Gideon took a step, and then another, and Harrow tried to squirm out of her arms as soon as she realised what Gideon had in mind, but to no avail. Gideon held her fast. 

Unable to escape, Harrow screwed her eyes shut instead, before Gideon could drag her in front of the mirror.

“You _are_ beautiful, Harrow.” Gideon said, but Harrow only shook her head, eyes still tightly closed. “I don’t know why you don’t see what I do, when I look at you. Won’t you let me show you?”

Harrow didn’t move.

“Please?” The ‘please’ was Harrow’s undoing. In the end, she could deny Gideon nothing.

She looked into the mirror, her gaze instinctively seeking Gideon’s eyes, the distinctive golden irises that she still expected to be in Gideon’s face, but instead it was her face they looked out of, so it was her face she saw.

It was a face transformed, not only by that one stolen and beloved feature, but by the act of loving. There was new colour in her cheeks, an almost swollen flush to her slightly-parted lips. Where most of her expressions served only to amplify the sharp lines of her face, desire had blunted them; cheeks subtly rounded by her slight smile, brows relaxed, not drawn together in furrowed harshness, and her hair - which had already grown out visibly since being shorn only hours earlier - was a fuzzy, dishevelled halo, softening her outline. 

Her heaving breaths took focus away from the pinched indentations between her ribs, and instead she found her gaze drawn to the upturned peaks of her breasts, to the tender hollow of her stomach, and then the sharp lines of her hips, cradled by Gideon's hands, drew the eye down further, to the tight curls of hair between her legs. 

Most of all, though, she looked at Gideon, and saw the undisguised desire on her face, her reflected expression naked, uncalculated, and adoring. Harrow’s frame was slender enough that much of Gideon’s body was also visible, and for the first time, Harrow could compare them without judgement or competition. Her body was not a wasted mockery of Gideon’s, did not fall short of her cavalier’s perfection, it was simply… different. A counterpoint, a complement. The true perfection was in how they fit together. 

Gideon’s eyes met hers in reflection, and Harrow saw her satisfaction.

“You understand now? You _are_ beautiful.”

“I am,” Harrow replied surprised by how easy those words were to say. “What now?”

Gideon’s gentle smile turned wicked.

“Eat me, Nonagesimus.”

And, at long last, she did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You made it all the way to the end! Thanks so much for reading, and I really hope you enjoyed it :)


End file.
